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Mac Wi-Fi Hack Mocked with Pwnie Award

Mac Wi-Fi Hack Mocked with Pwnie Award

by , 9:15 AM EDT, August 3rd, 2007

Last year at the Black hat Conference, David Maynor and Jon Ellchshowed off a controversial MacBook Wi-Fi security exploit that later appeared to be not much of a threat at all. This year, the hack was awarded a Pwnie award at the same conference for being the most over-hyped bug of the year, according to ZDNet.

Mr. Maynor originally demonstrated the vulnerability over video claiming that showing it live could potentially lead to audience members intercepting and using the hack themselves. There was never any substantial proof released to the public to show that the hack really worked, and Apple even went so far as to say there was no evidence that it worked at all on its standard hardware.

The Pwnie judges commented "In the end, the only public information about Maynor's Wi-Fi vulnerabilities are hype, denial, a media frenzy, and a patch that may or may not have been based on Maynor's findings."

  

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Close Name:jbruni Posts: 105 Joined: 14 Jul 2006
Fri Aug 03, 2007 2:29 pm Subject: Mac-bashers

That's a great quote with regards to the end result of the Maynor "hack". Oddly, however, a lot of mac-bashers continue to refer to the Maynor "hack" as proof that OS X is just as vulnerable as Windows. Yet in the end, there is nothing there. If that's the best the Mac-bashers can come up with...


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Close Name:Neil Anderson Posts: 16 Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Sat Aug 04, 2007 12:39 pm Subject: Pwnie

It ought to be pronounced phony award.


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Close Name:Guest
Sat Aug 04, 2007 12:40 pm Subject: Also the guy as a suspect in the...

Supply problems that caused the big Engadget Gaffe a few weeks ago.

This guy really seems to have it in for Apple; what've they done that he's so pissed off at them? Someone needs to give both him and "DVD-Jon" some valium or something... I guess they both just can't stand that Apple is doing so well by promoting open standards.


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