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    April 11th, 2008

    ♫ And the walls came down,
    All the way to hell.
    Never saw them when they’re standing,
    Never saw them when they fell…♫

    Words and music by The Traveling Wilburys (George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan).

    On March 27th, Security.IT.World web site reported on CanSecWest Security Conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest. The contest offered three operating systems that a hacker could attack: Vista, Linux and Mac. Day One didn’t see anyone able to hack into the systems when contestants were only able to attempt hacks via a network. On day Two, when the rules were changed to allow hackers to use web sites and emails to host their attacks, the MacBook Air with its Mac operating system went down first – in under 2 minutes. The hacker, Charlie Miller, earned himself $10,000 as well as the MacBook for his efforts.

    While this should put terror in the heart of anyone trying to protect their office systems from attacks, the beneficial side to these contests is that the vulnerabilities that they expose are reported (privately) to the developers of the software who can then patch them without the vulnerability becoming known.

    In a sense, allowing these attacks to occur in this organized fashion should help prevent the security walls from coming crashing down and our systems going all the way to hell as a result…

    This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Issues facing Law Firms, Technology, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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