A 25-year-old German graduate student who goes only by Nils has hacked Internet Explorer 8, along with Safari and Firefox, at CanSecWest’s hacking competition.
CanSecWest is a security conference that is being held at the Sheraton Wall Centre hotel in downtown Vancouver, B.C.
Microsoft is one of 16 listed sponsors. The conference started Monday and ends today.
The hacking competition is just one portion of a larger conference, but it gets most of the attention. This year, the hackers set to crack the major Internet browsers and mobile devices such as the Blackberry, iPhone, G1 Android phone and other smart phones.
Nils exploited all three of the browsers within 30 minutes, a conference spokeswoman said.
“He hasn’t told everybody his last name. Everybody’s been trying to get contact information, and he wont give his last name,” conference spokeswoman Melissa Pelto said.
TippingPoint Technologies, a company that designs intrusion detection systems, offers $5,000 in cash for bugs that are reported.
Security expert Charlie Miller was the first person to crack one of the world’s major browsers, breaking into Apple Inc.’s Safari in under 30 seconds.
“It was pretty much over before I knew it had started,” Pelto said.
Attacks are prepared beforehand and executed during the competition. Nobody has tried to hack Google’s Chrome browser.
A browser hack is defined as “code execution within the context of the application.” — In other words, getting it to do something, Pelto said.
For the mobile hacking competition, the user needs to gain access to a machine, run an application and demonstrate a loss of information or user data, Pelto said.
So far, nobody has hacked the mobile devices. Each day, additional software is loaded onto the mobile devices to make them easier to exploit.
“It will be interesting to see what comes out today,” Pelto said.
Ars Technica has more on Charlie Miller, and his former hacks.
