Fully patched versions of Firefox, Chrome, IE 11 and Safari exploited at Pwn2Own hacking competition

 

As in years past, the latest patched versions of the most popular web browsers around stood little chance against those competing in the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition. The usual suspects – Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer – all went down during the two-day competition, earning researchers a collective total of $557,500 in prize money.
 
The event, which took place at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, was sponsored by the Hewlett-Packard Zero Day Initiative. During the first day, HP awarded $317,500 to researchers that exploited flaws in Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and Firefox.
 
eWeek notes that the first reward, paid to a hacker by the name of ilxu1a, was for an out-of-bounds memory vulnerability in Firefox. It took less than a second to execute which earned him a cool $15,000.
 
Firefox was exploited twice during the event. Daniel Veditz, principal security engineer at Mozilla, said the foundation was on hand during the event to get the bug details from HP. Engineers are already working on a fix back at home, he added, that could be ready as early as today.
 
Another security researcher, JungHoon Lee, managed to demonstrate exploits against Chrome, IE 11 and Safari. As you can imagine, he walked away with quite a bit of money: $75,000 for the Chrome bug, $65,000 for IE and $50,000 for the Safari vulnerability. He also received two bonuses totaling $35,000.
 
 

~ Shawn Knight

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Best Web Browser (Final)

The Straight Dope

With all due respect to diehard Firefox fans, the spunky browser is no longer our favorite vehicle for surfing the web. That distinction now belongs to Chrome, the sleekest and fastest browser available. Our primary gripe with Chrome in our last browser roundup two years ago was that it didn’t support hardware acceleration without mucking around with secret code. That’s long been addressed and our only lingering concern is that Google may cater to advertisers a bit too much, hence it being the last of the major browsers to implement Do Not Track technology, which still isn’t turned on by default.
 
We also have to give props to Microsoft for its work with Internet Explorer 11. If you’re rocking a touchscreen in Windows 8/8.1, you may prefer to use IE11 over Chrome simply because it’s better suited for touch navigation. It’s also fast, though we’re calling shenanigans on Microsoft’s own tech demos, which seem to heavily favor its own browser over the competition, even though others also boast GPU acceleration. Still, it’s the best version of IE yet, and we especially like the side-by-side browsing feature when launching the browser from the Start screen.
 
Where does that leave the others? Firefox is still a great browser with a rich catalog of extensions, and Opera is one to keep an eye on now that it shares DNA with Chrome. That leaves Safari as the odd man out, a decision Apple ultimately made for the masses by discontinuing support for Windows.
 
Note: This article was originally featured in the December 2013 issue of the magazine.

 

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed is an Intel Core i7 930, Asus P6X58D Premium, 12GB Corsair DDR3/1866 RAM, Radeon HD 7970, OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD, and Windows 8.1 64-bit.
 
~ Paul Lilly

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Microsoft puts Internet Explorer 11 under the spotlight

Much has been said about Windows 8.1 in the media since it was publically revealed and subsequently made available for download in the form of a preview version released at Microsoft’s Build conference last month. Through it all, one of the major improvements – Internet Explorer 11 – hasn’t received much attention.

Microsoft recently published a blog post on this very subject designed to highlight some of the browser's key features. Chief among them is the ability to open up to 100 tabs per window, overcoming the previous limitation of 10 tabs at once.
 

 
One might expect some slowdown from having so many tabs open at once, but Microsoft says that isn’t the case. Tabs that haven’t been recently used will essentially be unloaded, thus freeing up valuable system resources for other tasks. This also means that with a mobile device, multiple tabs won’t drain your battery as quickly as they might with another browser.
 


Another new addition to Internet Explorer 11 is the ability to anticipate where you might want to go next on the web. When a user demonstrates intent to navigate, like tapping on the address bar or creating a new tab, IE11 will instantly present a list of frequently visited sites. Typing in a few characters in the address bar will result in relevant, rich suggestions and auto-completion to speed up navigation.
 
These are just a couple of the features that Microsoft decided to highlight in IE11. I haven’t had the opportunity to try Windows 8.1 just yet but I must admit the browsing experience does look much improved. Have you had the chance to try IE11 yet, and if so, what do you think?
 
~ Shawn Knight

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