Vista second OS to fall to hackers in security contest

At the PWN2OWN contest this year, hackers were given the chance to circumvent security defenses in the latest versions of Mac OS X, Windows Vista and in a distribution of Linux. Winners were awarded cash prizes and the laptop they had hacked, but also had to sign a nondisclosure agreement so that the vendor could address a security fix without having to worry about malware taking advantage first.

The three laptops (VAIO VGN-TZ37CN running Ubuntu 7.10, Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate SP1, and a MacBook Air running OSX 10.5.2) all held out for the first day of the contest (remotely exploitable vulnerabilities), and so the rules were relaxed on the second day to also include any default installed client-side applications. This led to a quick compromise of Safari, and therefore of the MacBook Air laptop. Vista and Linux remained unscathed. On the third day, the rules were changed again: "popular" third-party client applications were added to the mix, and this is where Vista's security features could not keep up.