Linux survives "PWN 2 OWN"

As you might recall, the aptly-named "PWN 2 OWN" contest kicked off with a bang last week, when a MacBook Air was "PWNED" in 2 minutes flat by hacker Charlie Miller. While that might have been the beginning of the end, the contest was far from over: both Windows Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 7.10 remained in the last-man-standing contest. On Friday, however, Shane Macaulay finally cracked the Fujitsu laptop running Vista SP1; he claims that the extra security measures in SP1 made the machine harder to hack and forced him to seek out help from VMware researcher Alexander Sotirov. As for the Linux machine? While hackers tried throughout the contest to compromise the Sony Vaio laptop running Ubuntu, none had succeeded by the contest's end. "I was surprised that it didn't go," said Terri Forslof, manager of security response for TippingPoint.

For more on the conclusion of PWN 2 OWN:
- see this PC World article