Mac Hack Contest Bug Had Been Public for a Year

When Charlie Miller won $10,000 for hacking into a Macbook Air laptop last month, he exploited a flaw that had been publicly disclosed nearly a year before the contest. The flaw, it turns out, lay in an open-source software library called the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library, which is used by many products including Apache, the PHP scripting language, and Apple’s Safari browser, which Miller hacked to win the contest. Miller won $10,000 and a new Macbook Air last month after hacking into the laptop in a matter of minutes. The PWN2OWN contest invited hackers to try to install unauthorized software on fully patched Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers using previously undisclosed zero-day flaws