ComputerWorld is reporting that Safari was the first browser to fall in the yearly CanSecWest contest ‘PWN2OWN.’
The exploit was run by the same Charlie Miller who won last year with another Mac vulnerability.Mr. Miller ran the exploit through a URL, making this a link baiting style of threat. Mostly it’s an interesting bit of tech gossip that you can toss around with your like minded friends but it makes me think more about Mac users and security.
A large chunk of Apple’s recent growth has been from less savvy people moving to OS X for it’s ease of use and security. These are the types of people most likely to fall into the trap of link baiting. On top of that, through a lack of understanding these types of people are likely to blame the computer before their own actions. This quickly shifts a new users opinion from ‘Apple is heaps better than Microsoft’ to ‘Apple is no diffent from Microsoft but cost me $800 more.’
I’m not saying this will happen or it even being likely, but I know that anyone I have converted to Macs in the last 2 year would be some annoyed if they got a virus. And they would have no clue how to fix it.
Update: ZDNet has an interesting interview with Charlie Miller in their blog section. It was posted late yesterday and Ryan Naraine poses some interesting question and gets some unexpected answers. Basically, it comes down to that since Apple has not needed to focus heavily on patching exploits and securing the OS and Safari in particular from the top down there are exploits waiting to be found across the board. It’s a good read; check it out here.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/
