Linux ignored, not immune, says hacker contest sponsor
People shouldn't read anything into the fact that of the three laptops set up for last week's "PWN to OWN" hack challenge, the only one left standing was running Linux, said the security expert who oversaw the contest.
"There was just no interest in Ubuntu," said Terri Forslof, manager of security response at 3Com Corp.'s TippingPoint subsidiary, which put up the cash prizes awarded at the contest last week at CanSecWest. "A contest such as this is not a measure of relative security between operating systems. It's not an accurate barometer."
Just because the laptop -- a Sony running the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution of Linux -- was untouched doesn't mean that the operating system is any more secure than either Mac OS X or Windows Vista, both of which fell to attacks.
