Mac Wi-Fi Hack Mocked with Pwnie Award

August 2nd, 2007 at 3:00 PM - News by Jeff Gamet

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 Maynoris Wi-Fi vulnerabilities are hype, denial, a media frenzy, and a patch that may or may not have been based on Maynoris findings."