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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.

Internet Explorer has been in a features arms race with Firefox for a while. More and more people are switching to Firefox because of its speed and stability. A big reason people still use Internet Explorer is it is the first browser that a new user will see so they become familiar with it.. If Internet Explorer did not ship with Windows it would not have the amount of users it does.

If that new user wants to use Internet Explorer but wants to give their browsing a speed boost. Here are a few tips.

If you Don’t Need a Proxy Don’t Use One.

A proxy server is used if you have a slow connection. If you have a high speed connection you usually don’t need it. Here is how you remove it. Go to tools and select Internet Options. In the Internet Options click on the Connections tab and press the LAN settings. Just remove all of the check marks, click on OK.

Get Rid of 3rd Party Toolbars

Some software companies have learned that there is money to be made by installing their software branded toolbar. The problem with these toolbars is when installed they take up bandwidth and computer resources while you browse the internet. To remove the toolbars you don’t need, just identify the toolbar and remove it for add/remove programs. If it is not listed in add/remove programs it may be spyware. You will then need to scan your computer with your favorite spyware/malware software.

Increase the Amount of Connections Internet Explorer uses.

By default Internet Explorer only uses 10 simultaneous connections to download content from a webpage. Here is how you can increase the amount of connections. Open notepad and paste the code below in it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings]

“MaxConnectionsPerServer”=dword:00000020

“MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server”=dword:0000020

Save the file by clicking save as, change Save as type to All Files, name the file speedup.reg.

So there you have it. With these few changes you can really change the performance of Internet Explorer. If you want a completely better experience give Firefox a try. You won’t be disappointed.