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switcher (Score:5, Funny)
Explanatin of rules relaxation (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, nobody was able to remotely hack the machine, so they allowed for local exploits, which someone used in a Safari URL.
Expect Apple-haters and other FUDmeisters to completely ignore the difference, like InfoWorld did yesterday in their breathless headline about "remotely breaking in."
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Re:Explanatin of rules relaxation (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nancy Gohring, writing for InfoWorld, delivered a misleading report yesterday on a Mac security exploit contest held at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, BC.
"In her defense, it appears likely that Gohring did not write the headline for her InfoWorld article, which described the contest winner as being "able to remotely break into a Mac as part of a contest designed to illustrate security flaws in OS X." That part was simply wrong.
"Whoever did write the headline must have been smoking weed in celebration of 4/20, because Gohring's article clearly described a local exploit. There's a big difference between the remote exploits that made Windows infamous for its insecurity and a local exploit of an application."
More info under a series of subheadings:
Gohring's Mac Security Myths
Microsoft's Security Embarrassment
Mac OS X and Security
The Mac Minority Malware Myth
Why Macs Aren't Sending You Spam
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So, if I reaf TFA correctly: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, if I reaf TFA correctly: (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:So, if I reaf TFA correctly: (Score:5, Informative)
The rules originally required getting a user shell on a macbook connected to a wireless router without any other access, or getting a root shell under the same conditions on a second macbook without using the same bug.
The prize was the macbook(s) you hacked.
But they decided not enough people were interested, so 3Com added a $10,000 bounty for a winning bug.
But no one could crack it, so they set the machine up to visit malicious web pages submitted by email.
Then someone found a bug in Safari, and successfully crafted a webpage to exploit it to get user shell access.
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Admin user or regular user? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line no remote hacks.
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Re:Admin user or regular user? (Score:5, Insightful)
And why on earth does it make a difference whether the user account was admin or regular? If an intruder has access to your personal documents, you're just as fucked either way.
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Re:Admin user or regular user? (Score:4, Funny)
However, if someone has access to root, they can do a lot more malicous things. bots, keloggers, etc...
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(2) You don't need root to launch an application (like a bot) or even install a keylogger (suid isn't set for KeyboardViewerServer, for example).
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Hmm... the way Apple packages apps it'd be pretty easy, I think, to run the web browser in a chroot jail. You can probably still get out of a chroot jail but it'd make compromising anything important on the system that much harder.
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skewers that very behavior of Safari you describe [third-design.net]. Of course, if you have "open safe files after downloading" turned off, it's even more obnoxious—you have to find the file on your desktop and open it manually. Exactly the sort of repetitive task I thought my computer should be doing on my behalf.
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Or you could double-click on the file's icon in the Safari downloads window. If you really want to examine it in the Finder, then you can click on the magnifying glass icon to view it.
Exactly the sort of task your computer does on your behalf :-)
The "never opened before" dialog is good. (Score:3, Insightful)
This, IMO, is a Good Thing. It's only a half a second delay when I really do want it to launch a new application, and it's a nice heads-up that the computer is doing something that I've never done with it before. More than once
Re:So, if I reaf TFA correctly: (Score:5, Informative)
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no such thing as a white hat... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean - I can only assume this was a 'white hat' hackers conference, given there was actual publicity given and a public bounty and such. But then things like these pop up?
Makes me think.. black hat, white hat.. what's the difference these days? I thought a white hat hacker was the 'good guy' (albeit still a hacker).. the kind of person who hacks for fun / curiosity.. the kind of person who notifies the developer of the bug or, at least, just makes the bug known to the world at no charge. Not the kind of person who hacks, then scours the 'security conferences' for a bounty, and when that bounty is lower than what they could get off of actual 'bad guys', complain that the bounty is too low. To me, that just sounds like the person is a black hat, but dons a white hat on top in an attempt to fool us into thinking they're white hat.
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Re:no such thing as a white hat... (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, maybe a black hat tendency, but there might be alternatives.
There are plenty of security companies out there legitimately trying to sell their software, plenty of people who would love to be the only ones who have a defense against some secret hack. If you want me to spend time finding a vulnerability and then into writing an exploit, my time would not come cheap. I'm not even talented in that direction. Imagine that you're a security researcher who gets paid for your time investigating and resolving potential security breaches, what kind of payoff makes it worth investing your time in that gamble? It has to be a pretty penny or else you're better served doing what you do for a living.
"Give me the money" is a legit response when you've invested your time and effort into something with that as your goal. If he'd said "I don't hack for fun or evil, I only did this for the contest and expect to be given what I was promised" then I don't think you'd have the same take. There is a good chance that is exactly what he meant too. You might be shocked to learn that a lot of us who are considered computer geeks are not the world's foremost verbal communicators.
I love my job, but I won't work here long after they stop paying me.
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Well, only if you disregard grammar, spelling, and vocabulary.
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The Register is more informative. (Score:2, Informative)
I wish they'd been more explicit as to what 'relaxing the rules' meant. But maybe that would've spoiled the story.
They allowed user activity, aka he browsed to a site he created for the purpose. It seems this is not a full auto worm type exploit of the kind common in the Windoze world. See here [theregister.co.uk]. It's hard to say if the problem was javascript of something like Flash called by it.
All the M$ tools are going to be underlining their popularity arguments and slinging mud at all the more secure OS. Even
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Notoriety is pretty low down on a penetration expert's priorities, especially if he's targeting Windows (imagine the headline: "Shock! Horror! Windows MAY be vulnerable!") Even in the case of this competition, I'd be surprised if any of the entrants believed they would gain fame/infamy outside a niche maligned
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Marketshare has a significant role in the success of a virus. If a virus is going to be rejected by 95% of the computers it hits, frequently (such as with e-mailed viruses) in some way that draws attention to the issue on the computers it fails, it's likely to be detected far earlier and stamped out than if it is rejected by only 5% of the computers.
In other words: One of the reasons its so difficult to write a virus for Mac OS X is that it would have immense difficulty finding other Macs to spread to.
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It's actually a swarm of mod-bots doing it.
Zero Day misnomer (Score:2)
In my expeience, managers of large organizations do not take Zero Day risks seriously, and often don't really understand them. The ris
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Konqueror (Score:5, Interesting)
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By the way— Should be "update's," for consistency.
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It could be, though IIRC most of the past security holes have only affected one and not the other, for some reason.
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Read a better article than the one linked. (Score:5, Informative)
This seems a little sensationalized... (Score:4, Informative)
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Or to osascript -e 'tell application "Mail" to send contents of folder "~" to everyone in Address Book'.
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I have been a dedicated mac user for more than 10 years, but I find it ludicrous that people believe that macos is invulnerable or any discovered exploits must be fake.
Hey, good! (Score:2, Insightful)
(I said honest efforts. That guy who claimed the AirPort hack is still a raging tool.)
Another point to emphasize—and which,
there are some weird things in Safari... (Score:5, Informative)
Safari lets you include local files, for example...
i told apple (and got a lame reply that it would be fixed eventually) month ago, yet it still works.
see http://destabili.zation.eu/ [zation.eu] for a quick harmless example that can check what applications you got installed.
and then there is a way to crash Safari which exists for more than a year - again i had an email conversation where they wanted more info and crashreports - yet nothing was ever done about it.
http://lixlpixel.org/safaricrash/ [lixlpixel.org] and follow the instructions - but make sure you don't have any important tabs open...
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What I want to know (Score:4, Interesting)
While I understand that for the purposes of the contest it might have been necessary to reduce those protections, I think that before something becomes "news" we should know what the real risk is.
Does this hack require the user to manually disable protections the OS ships with, or manually enable services that default to off? The article seems light on detail.
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Why are you annoyed? (Score:2)
Why do you get annoyed? Does it make you feel inferior or something?
Here's a quick lesson: learn to ignore it and get on with your life. If you don't have the time figure out Linux, or you don't have the money to spend on a Mac, no-one will begrudge you that. Just be proud with what you have and don't let anyone get you down. Seriously, it's not worth getting annoyed over.
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My room mate's windows box stopped talking to the network again last night. She's got at least three or four different security or anti-spyware applications running on that thing. She just upgraded one of them and it apparently conflicted with another one and so her network stopped working. First thing out of my mouth when she tells me this i
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Normally we make fun of Slashdot editors for not being able to spell simple English terms familiar to a mass audience correctly. They loose there audience when they do that. Usually they can get their terms of art correct. Not this time. (Not a sentence)
Guys, it's spelled "0day", and it has been since before you l33ch3d Karateka on a catfur. Do have some sense of perspective. (Question mark?)
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I can't believe my TAs for Intermediate Slashdot Trolling For The Playstation Generation are actually deducting points for such an accurate depiction of them.
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You've got an excuse for "Spelled/Spelt" but what about everything else? When you're slamming the editors for misspelling common simple words, and in your post you do the exact same thing.
I think you should step away from the keyboard and reevaluate your life.
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http://dict.die.net/hacker/ [die.net]
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who
enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about
programming.
8. (Deprecated) A malicious meddler who tries to discover
sensitive information by poking around. Hence "password
hacker", "network hacker". The correct term is cracker.
http://dict.die.net/cracker/ [die.net]
jargon An individual who attempts to gain unauthorised
access to a computer system. These individuals are often
malicious and have many means at their disposal for breaking
into a system.
While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some
playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques,
anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the
desire to do so except for immediate practical reasons (for
example, if it's necessary to get around some security in
order to get some work done).
So while most hackers are crackers, most crackers are not hackers. (Sort of like 'all panthers are cats, but not all cats are panthers.')
You know that is a fallacy, right? (Score:2)
They're different, so you can't compare them like that.
Also, it is very obvious that if someone did find an exploit, they would be on the front page of every geek site on the web. So anyone doing it for ego would spend all their time trying to break OSX in some meaningfull way, which this wasn't.