Apple Mocks Vista (SP1) and Praises Hack Victim No. 1 Leopard

There is simply no end in sight for the Mac OS X and Windows operating system measuring contest, at least not from Apple's perspective. The Cupertino-based company has a consistent marketing arsenal, and it uses it to take jabs at both Windows and the PC manufacturers. This because Apple through Mac OS X is competing directly with Microsoft, and via the Mac computers is going head to head against OEMs building PCs. Among Apple's diversified arsenal of anti-PC and anti-Windows marketing solutions, the most prominent are without a doubt the Get a Mac video ads. The latest two examples of Get a Mac advertisements are included at the bottom of this article.

By any measure Apple should bury its head in the sand, as its secure-by-default and out of-the-box Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard operating system running on a MacBook Air was the first to be hacked at the recent PWN2OWN contest at CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 sponsored by TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative. The fully patched Leopard was owned through a zero-day security vulnerability in the also fully patched Safari 3.1 browser.

"OSX fell inside of 2 minutes on day 2 of pwn2own when you were allowed to log in locally and browse to an exploit web site. All you apparently need to pwn the Mac is in-box applications - for Vista - the researcher who owned it needed not only Flash but Java as well (it's unclear as to why Java was needed but the thinking is perhaps it was needed to get some executable pages for the shellcode due to NX / XD / DEP)," said Robert Hensing, Microsoft Security Software Engineer.

Windows Vista Ultimate Service Pack 1 was also owned, but the security researchers that hacked it had to do it through third-party solutions and not via a security vulnerability in Microsoft's latest Windows client. Moreover, Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel from Independent Security Evaluators, the winners of the hacked MacBook Air and $10,000 revealed that they had chosen Mac OS X because it was the simplest to hack in comparison to Windows Vista SP1 and Ubuntu Linux 7.10. Still, Apple has no apparent issues of praising Hack Victim No.1 Leopard in the detriment of its rivals.





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