For those who aren’t familiar with the event, thePwnie Awardsis an annual awards show celebrating failures and achievements in the security community. This year’s ceremony took place in Las Vegas, Nevada at the BlackHat security conference.
All together there were 9 awards handed out, and it probably won’t surprise you that a certain iDevice hacker took home one of them. As a matter of fact, 2 well known members of thejailbreakcommunity ended up taking home Pwnies…
It’s not hard to believe that the 19-year oldComextook the award for the Best Client-Side Bug with hisJailbreakMePDF exploit. After all, the tool is attributed with jailbreaking over a million iDevices, and exposing anextremely dangeroussecurity flaw in iOS.
“Comex exploited a vulnerability in the interpreter for Type 1 font programs in the FreeType library used by Mobile Safari. This exploit is a great example of programming a weird machine to exploit a modern system. Comex used his control over the interpreter to construct a highly sophisticated ROP payload at runtime and bypass the ASLR protection in iOS.”
There was also a Best Song category, and believe it or not,GeoHottook home the gold. His Light it Up Contest video, whichthe hacker madein response to his legal battles with Sony, won the Pwnie for the best hacker-written ballad. In other news, Sony took home the Most Epic FAIL award.
As easy as it is these days for us to jailbreak our devices, it’s easy to forget how hard others work to make it possible. It’s very nice to see Comex rewarded for his efforts. And GeoHot? Well, I suppose he deserved his Pwnie too. His rapwaspretty entertaining.
What do you think?
