VANCOUVER–If there’s one thing that emerged from all of the craziness that was CanSecWest, Pwn2Own and Pwnium, it’s that life is becoming more difficult for researchers and attackers looking to exploit modern browsers. It’s not impossible, of course, but it’s certainly not the warm-up exercise that it was four or five years ago.
VIEW SLIDESHOW: Weird Science: 10 Forms of Biometric Authentication In the past twenty years, we’ve gone from using amber-tinted dumb terminals connected to refrigerator-sized mainframe computers to sleek tablet computers and smart phones tucked into our pockets. Despite those changes, one technology has stubbornly persisted: passwords. Indeed, the explosion in computing devices and Web-based services has made us more dependent on passwords than ever.
Google has pushed out a patch for the second full sandbox escape exploit used in the Pwnium contest at CanSecWest. The Chrome vulnerabilities that the exploit targeted were discovered by an anonymous researcher who used the name PinkiePie and claimed a $60,000 reward from Google.
When the long arm of the law reached in to arrest members of Anonymous’s senior leadership on Tuesday, speculation immediately turned to the identities of the six men behind the Guy Fawkes mask. With the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that many had been hiding in plain site, with day jobs, burgeoning online lives and – for those who knew where to look – plenty of clues about their extra curricular activities on behalf of the world’s most famous hacking crew.
VANCOUVER–Say what you will about Chaouki Bekrar, but the man is nothing if not frank. Bekrar, who is the public face of the VUPEN team that has been toying with the Pwn2Own contest this week, has become a lightning rod in the debate over exploit sales, and from all outward appearances, he couldn’t be happier about it.
Hector Xavier Monsegur or “Sabu,” de facto ringleader of the notorious Anonymous Internet Collective, was not merely a talented hacker. He was also something of a Robin Hood of the East Side projects and a hard-partying nuisance to his neighbors, a report by the New Yok Times claims.
The same team from VUPEN that took down Google Chrome on Wednesday has succeeded in compromising Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, using two separate bugs. The success at the Pwn2Own contest was the result of a heap overflow bug in IE as well as a separate bug in the browser’s protected mode.
VANCOUVER–Google has already patched the bugs used by researcher Sergey Glazunov to compromise Chrome on Wednesday as part of the company’s Pwnium contest at the CanSecWest conference here.
Cupertino, California-based Apple released fixes for a bevy of security flaws in its iOS mobile operating system, including security flaws affecting the Siri personal assistant, the iOS passcode feature, and more than five dozen flaws in the WebKit Web rendering enging used by both iOS and Android devices.
VANCOUVER–One of the first things we’re taught as kids is that sharing is good. If you have two Chocodiles and Billy has none, you give him one. Sharing once was the norm in the security community–or, more specifically, certain sections of it–as well, but if the atmosphere at the CanSecWest conference this year are any indication, those days are quickly coming to an end.
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