Two days into the Pwn2Own hacking challenge, only a few still remain.
So far, hackers have not been able to exploit Mozilla Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome, and the mobile Android OS.
Victims of the contest include Internet Explorer 8, Apple Safari 5, iOS 4 and BlackBerry.
All the security researchers who manage to exploit the browsers or operating systems take home a cash prize of $15,000 and a laptop. If Chrome gets beaten, the researcher takes home $20,000.
Charlie Miller beat the iPhone 4 with iOS and has taken home the prize in 2007, 2009, 2010 and this year.
Firefox fixed 10 security flaws the day before the contest started, and Google fixed 9. Chrome has yet to be defeated since its launch in 2008, while Firefox was beaten in 2009 and 2010.
Security researchers from VUPEN beat Safari 5, rather easily: “We pwned Apple Safari on Mac OS X (x64) at Pwn2Own in 5 seconds.”
Result for: mozilla
Mozilla’s senior exec Asa Dotzler has gone off on Google, Apple and Microsoft this week, ranting on the “evils” of their plugins which install in Firefox without asking the user permission.
Result for: mozilla
Mozilla has released their 2009 earnings statement this week, which shows explosive revenue growth for the company.
In 2008, Mozilla had $78 million in revenue, with sales surging to $104 million last year.
It is still unclear how exactly sales jumped so much, but the statement says “a majority of Mozilla revenue continues to be generated from the search functionality included in Mozilla’s Firefox product from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and a handful of others.”
One such example is how Google gives Mozilla a tiny piece of its search ad revenue as long as Mozilla makes Google the default search engine in the popular Firefox browser.
That deal will last through the end of 2011.
Expenses increased to $61 million in 2009.
140 million users worldwide actively use the Firefox browser.
