Apr 24, 2007
The folks at Apple and all the Mac OSX fanatics love to mock windows and gloat about how secure the MacOS is in comparison. Many have said that this is only because nobody is trying to hack it.
It turns out that a guy entered a Mac Hack contest and was able to hack one in less than 30 min. Here is an exerpt:
The hacker that won the challenge, who asked ZDNet Australia to identify him only as "gwerdna", said he gained root control of the Mac in less than 30 minutes.
"It probably took about 20 or 30 minutes to get root on the box. Initially I tried looking around the box for certain mis-configurations and other obvious things but then I decided to use some unpublished exploits -- of which there are a lot for Mac OS X," gwerdna told ZDNet Australia .
According to gwerdna, the hacked Mac could have been better protected, but it would not have stopped him because he exploited a vulnerability that has not yet been made public or patched by Apple.
Apparently apple just sent out a patch to all Macs with 25 security patches...twenty five. I wish Microsoft would make a commercial that has the nerdy "PC guy" smack the hip cocky mac guy around.
On the Vista front, Samsung has announced a new hybrid hard drive which will couple nicely with Vista and provide significant performance and major boosts to laptop battery life.
Comments
The flash-enabled hard drives are cool. I am running Vista Home Premium 32 on my main machine at home and it's pretty nice (tried 64, but it is terribly unstable). The speedboost feature, where a USB drive is used to cache data is really sweet, as is the prefetcher.
Posted by: John Jenkins | April 24, 2007 04:31 PM
Yeah, I am waiting to get Vista machines next summer (08) and hopefully my laptop will have a huge new flash hard drive...and hopefully the cost will have come down by then.
Very cool on the readyboost stuff - do you think that it would use an SD card if you have a built in SD card reader in a laptop?
Posted by: Reid Monaghan | April 24, 2007 05:40 PM