Pwn2Own wrap up and analysis
Aaron Portnoy · Network Security · 2010
Each year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, security company Tipping Point sponsors a competition that pits security researchers against each other in a bid to hack some of the most popular software and hardware products. The 2010 competition yielded some interesting results. Firefox, running on Windows 7, was hacked and forced to run an executable program. Internet Explorer 8 also fell victim to an attack, and Apple's iPhone and MacBook Pro were compromised. Aaron Portnoy of Tipping Point was monitoring the contest to see how things unfolded, and found some lessons in this year's contest. The hacks tell us some useful things about the broader security landscape, and the threats facing today's software and hardware customers. In this article, he details some of the key things that we can take away from the proceedings. We have just wrapped up this year's Pwn2Own contest, an annual event held at CanSecWest, where security researchers compete to find bugs in common browsers and smartphones. This year's contest included several impressive exploits against targets including Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Firefox and the iPhone.