What I Know It’s About Experience

Pwn2Own is the brain child of Dragos Ruiu, the founder and director of the CanSecWest security conference.  This is an annual conference held every year in Vancouver, Canada (usually late March).  If you have never been to it I highly recommend the event. This is probably the most technically advanced conference world wide, even more so then events like Blackhat or Hack In The Box.  It tends to be smaller, about 200 people.  The Pwn2Own is an event where conference attendees are challenged to hack a fully patched device.  The first contest began in 2007 with just a Macbook laptop, but has grown to include items such as a Windows laptop and iPhone.  What makes this contest different then other hacking events is the caliber of contestants.  You literally have some of the best exploit developers in the world. They are motivated with a total of $100,000, but in addition gain tremendous bragging rights.  Many of the contestants said it took them 1-2 weeks to develop the exploits, in some cases two people worked together.  That averages 80-160 man hours to create an exploit. This year at the contest the following fully patched systems were successfully hacked.  

 

Firefox on 64-bit Windows 7

  Internet Explorer 8 on 64-bit Windows 7

  Safari on Mac OS X

  iPhone

So, what does that mean to us?  In general three things.

via HoneyTech Security Update