Hackers Exploit Windows 7 in 2 Minutes
It did not take more than 2 minutes for the first hacker at Pwn2Own hacking contest to sidestep the security measures of Windows 7.
Both Peter Vreugdenhil of the Netherlands and a German who called himself Nils succeeded in exploiting a fully updated 64-bit version of Windows 7 by disabling DEP and ASLR, two of the most important security measures in the operating system, during the annual hacking contest in Vancouver, British Columbia
Vreugdenhil, a freelance vulnerability researcher, who used Internet Explorer 8, only needed a couple of minutes to gain control over the computer. Approximately half-hour later, Nils, a computer science student who last year nabbed Pwn2Own’s $15,000 cash prize by exploiting Firefox, Safari and IE8, circumvented the same defensive mechanisms to exploit Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6.
Both hackers were awarded with the notebook they attacked, $10,000 in cash and a paid trip to the DefCon hackers conference in Las Vegas this summer.
TippingPoint, one of the sponsors of the contest, bought the rights to the attack codes and vulnerabilities used by Vreugdenhil and Nils. The information will be handed over to Microsoft and Mozilla.
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