Iphone and Blackberry fall to hackers at Pwn2Own contest

THE IPHONE 4 AND BLACKBERRY TORCH were hacked on day two of the Pwn2Own hacking contest in Vancouver, BC.

Charlie Miller, a researcher who has successfully performed Apple smartphone hacks in previous years, broke into the Iphone 4. He had help from his Independent Security Evaluators colleague Dion Blazakis, taking advantage of a browser flaw which has now been fixed in IOS 4.3.

The Blackberry Torch 9800 was hacked by a crack team of researchers who took advantage of a Webkit browser vulnerability. The winning teams each took home a cash prize of $15,000 and the device they hacked.

The Samsung Nexus S and Dell Venue Pro went unchallenged, with contestants who had put their names down failing to show up. This included George Hotz, the famous PS3 hacker who probably has enough legal troubles with Sony to be dealing with at the moment.

Android was particularly lucky to avoid a hack this time though. Security researcher Jon Oberheide said he missed out on the $15,000 cash prize after reporting the flaw to Google, as he didn't believe it qualified for the competition.

Safari and Internet Explorer were hacked on day one, but Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome remained unscathed, probably due to some hurried judicious patching before the event. And of course, this doesn't mean they are unhackable, just that flaws haven't been found yet. µ