Major smartphone platforms survive Pwn2Own
Sure seems like your handheld is a lot more secure than your computer, at least in some sense — although the desktop versions of IE 8, Safari, and Firefox were each almost instantly cracked on the first day of the Pwn2Own contest, no one claimed the $10,000 bounty placed on each of the major smartphone platforms. That’s certainly reassuring, but it may not ultimately mean much: according to contest organizers Tipping Point, the bugs in Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and the iPhone and BlackBerry OSes are still there, but they’re harder to exploit because of device, OS, and carrier variations. That makes any vulnerabilities even more valuable — one of the contestents apparently had an iPhone exploit ready to go, but wasn’t willing to part with it since he wanted more than $10K for it. Tipping Point says it’ll try and nail down specs of each platform earlier next year to make it easier on hackers, but let’s hope the results are similar.