Ubuntu Survives PWN to OWN Hackfest Unscathed

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

A laptop running Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) remained the only uncompromised system at the CanSecWest conference PWN to OWN competition.

The competition sees hackers compete to discover a 0 day code execution vulnerability, on one of three laptops running Mac OSX, Windows Vista or Ubuntu. The winners take the pwned laptop plus a generous cash award.

Mac OSX (10.5.2) fell on day two, after the discovery of a vulnerability in the Safari web browser allowed a team from Independent Security Evaluators to remotely exploit an Apple MacBook Air. Day three saw Shane Macauly of Security Objectives defeat the Windows Vista (SP1) laptop using an exploit against the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Well done Ubuntu.

Posted in Rants, ubuntu | No Comments »