Google’s investment in security experts to find weaknesses in its Chrome browser has apparently reaped dividends at a prominent hacking contest.
Mozilla’s Firefox also survived the Pwn2Own contest unscathed. Both companies sent out updates in recent weeks and offered cash prizes for anyone who found bugs, with Mountain View, Calif.-Google reportedly shelling out $14,000 for the tips.
The fifth annual contest coincides with the CanSecWest security conference held by HP TippingPoint and challenges security experts to take on patched versions of the latest browsers and operating systems for both desktop and mobile computers (with codes “frozen” two weeks earlier).
A Threepeat
It is the third straight year that Google’s Chrome has gone unhacked at the event and this year the search giant offered $10,000 — in addition to the contest prize cash and the computer used in the contest — to the first team to discover a weakness. Although two teams registered to do so, one didn’t show up and the other reportedly decided to attack Research in Motion’s BlackBerry software instead.
Among the losers were Microsoft ‘s Internet Explorer 8, which was found to have three unpatched vulnerabilities by a British independent researcher, Stephen Fewer, ComputerWorld reported. Fewer said he spent six weeks developing an attack on Explorer’s sandbox, which is designed to keep malicious code out.
Apple’s Safari, just updated for bugs, also fell, in a mere five seconds to a French team who exploited a weakness in the open-source browser rendering engine, Webkit, according to ZDNet, which said the team from the testing firm Vupen won $15,000 and an Apple MacBook Air.
The hackers attacked the browsers one at a time, rather than go head to head to see which fell first.
“Looks like Google scared off the hackers with its security updates,” said Ed Skoudis, an instructor at the SANS cybersecurity institute in…