Security & Privacy

ZDNet reports that the first computer to fall in the 2011 Pwn2Own hacking contest is a MacBook, and the crack was done via a Safari vulnerability. The winning team, from the French company VUPEN, exploited a weakness in WebKit, the framework used to display web pages in Safari and other applications. They said there are many WebKit vulnerabilities, and the exploit did not even crash the browser, so, in a real world situation, users could be attacked without any knowledge.

In other news, no one wanted to bother cracking Google’s Chrome browser. “If Chrome comes out unscathed, as it now appears it will, the browser will have survived three consecutive Pwn2Owns, a record.”