Hackers exploited the 3 major browsers on day one of Pwn2Own. As expected, IE8, FireFox and Safari were all penetrated within minutes of the competition starting.
Most impressively, Peter Vreugdenhil, was able to exploit a vulnerability in IE8 on Windows 7 allowing him to bypass the operating systems DEP (Data Execution System) security mechinism designed to stop this sort of attack. Vreugdenhil, a first time Pwn2Own participant, earned a $10,000 prize for his efforts.
The only browser left standing after day one was Google Chrome.
This video demonstrates a new orientation feature in Firefox 3.6. Right now it’s only supported on some new Macs and Thinkpads that have the hardware and drivers to expose the information.
I’m sure it won’t be long before other systems with Accelerometers, like HP laptops with “ProtectSmart”, will get some support.
In an article sure to rile up teh intarwebs, NetworkWorld details the results of some testing (by Microsoft, no less) in which the major browsers were exposed to known malware sites to see if they correctly identified & blocked them. The tests showed IE8 blocking 8 out of 10 sites correctly. The article goes on to say that the results of the rest of the browsers all depend on the way they use Google’s SafeBrowsing API. AdblockPlus+ NoScript works just fine for me, thxverymuch….
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=2c1bd23f-65d6-4ee6-9548-2202a140f6fe)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=190c0735-47df-4163-a8ab-755b11f400d9)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=c478b98b-3eb1-467f-b6bc-213705d1c4f7)
