Hack a Mac and get $10000

Organizers of CanSecWest are organizing a “PWN to OWN” content. PWM is an internet slang which means ‘to soundly defeat an opponent’. The contest is held on April 18-20 in Vancouver. Two Apple Macbook Pro will be the target, whoever successfully breaks into the machine can take it home along with $10000 in cash.

Both the Macbooks are connected to a wireless access point and are fully patched, including the latest patch which fixed 25 vulnerabilities that was released by Apple on Thursday. These machines are not loaded with any addition security software or settings and attendees can connect to the machines via WiFi or Ethernet. The original reward was just a MacBook, but attendees found that reward was not big enough to draw any interest.

They should have included two Windows machines and two Linux machines into the contest as well. None of these operating systems have the perfect security, but it’ll be interesting to see hackers fight to tame these machines. For developers, it’ll be a great way to find loopholes and fix them. For organizers, it’s an interesting way to give away the computers.

Source: News.com

This post was published by on April 20, 2007

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.undergroundrevolt.org jake

    most people don’t even bother learning how to hack a mac because macs are a “minority”. most hackers will have no idea how to hack these so they will be picking up the books to learn.

  • http://anirudhsanjeev.org Anirudh

    macs are built on the freebsd kernel which are quite secure. I daresay anyone will be actually be able to break in with all the enhancements.

    But nothing beats the security of something like hardened debian or hardened gentoo.

  • http://r9studio.com/blog r9studio

    Hi,seems mac book got hacked in the contest
    http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-6178131.html

  • http://r9studio.com/blog/macbook-hacked-in-contest-at-security-event/ MacBook hacked in contest at security event at r9Studio tech LOG

    [...] a Mac can be hacked.This was proven Friday by Shane Macaulay who managed to break into a Mac in a contest at the CanSecWest security conference in [...]