Final Results of the PWN to OWN Competition -- Ubuntu Victory!

PWN to OWN Competition is an annual contest established in 2007 by CanSecWest organizers where hackers get together to try to hack into machines. The main purpose of this contest is to responsibly unearth new vulnerabilities within these systems so that the affected vendor(s) can address them. This year's PWN to 0WN contest began on Mar 26th through to Mar 28th. The contest includes three laptops, running the most up to date and patched installations of MacOS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux. You can find more here. The final results are both surprising and unsurprising as well.

The first machine to go was the MacBook Air. Charlie Miller from Independent Security Evaluators, discovered an exploit in the Apple iPhone last year then compromised the MacBook Air in the first two minutes on Day two (!*Surprising*!).

The Vista machine was the next to go, on Day 3, the final day (!*Unsurprising*, it's destiny!). Shane Macaulay, from Security Objectives, found an exploit into Vista through a disclosed bug in Adobe Flash. He won the Fujitsu laptop running Windows Vista SP1, a $5,000 prize from Zero Day Initiative.

And finally, the machine running Ubuntu Linux wasn’t compromised at all. Hackers fails to do so. That's expected! :-)

Thus, Ubuntu was left standing. Hooray! Victory! Digg it here!

PS:
About the word `pwn'. For more see here.

Pwn (/poʊn/, /puːn/, /pɔːn/) is a leetspeak slang term that implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet gaming culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated. Past tense is sometimes spelled pwnt (pronounced with a t sound), pwned, pwnd, pwn3d, or powned (with the standard d sound). Examples include "pwnage" or "you just got pwned". It can also be used, especially by non-gamers, in the context of getting "pwned" by The Man.

In Internet security jargon, to "pwn" means "to compromise" or "to control", specifically another computer (server or PC), web site, gateway device, or application; it is synonymous with one of the definitions of hacking or cracking. An outside party who has "owned" or "pwned" a system has obtained unauthorized administrative control of the system.