Stay Safe, Don't Stick to the Edge

Wire

Stay Safe, Don’t Stick to the Edge

Hacking contest Pwn2Own 2017 celebrated its 10th anniversary, and after three days of hacking – it seems that Microsoft Edge is still getting bludgeoned quite hard.

The event took place over 3 days, where security teams hacked at browsers and operating systems. While Microsoft’s web browser suffered the most hit – it remains that Chrome is unhackable during the contest.

While Microsoft was touting its Edge browser as much more secure than their old Internet Explorers, and indeed it fared slightly better than IE and Safari in last year’s competition, it still has a long way to go to prove itself. Microsoft rewrote the entire code from scratch, safe a few parts that were inherited from IE. The tech giant really wants to keep up with Chrome and Firefox – even putting in sandboxing similar to Chrome.

However, according to the report by Tom’s Hardware, instead of faring better – it just did worst, getting hacked a total of 5 times in Pwn2Own.

Now for the other browsers – Safari got hacked successfully three and a half times; Firefox walked away with one attack – but that might be due to lack of attention spent on it by hackers during the competition; Chrome is still a fort during the competition, being unhackable during the competition.

Although keeping in mind that Edge was targeted quite a bit this year, it seems that majority of the attempts were successful during the competition, while other browsers might have more unsuccessful attempts during the allocated time duration.

More not-so-good news – Windows 10 isn’t really safe from harm either. It was noted that “every successful browser attack on Windows seemed to have a matching successful attack against the Windows kernel.”

Looks like Microsoft still has much work to do on their security side of things for both their browser and OS. With Apple coming close behind Microsoft – it might be a matter of time before Apple loses its crown as a comparatively more secure platform.

This report was sourced through Tom’s Hardware. For the details of the hack, and more on the competition, head to their report.