Friday, March 28, 2008

MacBook Air hacked in 2 minutes!

According to what I read, the MacBook Air, running OSX 10.5.2 was hacked in 2 minutes using a Safari vulnerability. This goes to show that what I've been advising my friends are accurate.

Rule #1, never use the default browser that comes with your operating system (e.g. windows, mac) as your main browser.

You can always use the browser on and off but you should never use it as your main browser. I have no idea why the trend nowadays is to keep bundling things together. The security risks goes up tremendously when you bundle something like a browser into the operating system, and you make "enhancements" to it such that programmers can easily "manipulate" some system level settings.

This itself is already a big risk. A browser should never ever be able to manipulate any settings in the operating system. This should be the first rule and it should never have been broken. ActiveX is one such big vulnerability. With regards to the Safari vulnerability, there has been no news so far but Apple has acknowledged the hack (and the problem). I'm still wondering how did Safari managed to allow hackers to gain access to the Mac. I do not remember any Safari specific codes that allows system access. Hmm....

Anyway, till now I'll still recommend my friends to either use Firefox, or Opera as your main browser. I still do.

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