At PHD, contestants hacked the latest version of the Safari browser for Windows

According to the author of the exploit - Nikita Tarakanov, Chief Technical Officer at the CISSRT company (which conducts software security researches) - to hack the browser, he and his colleagues created a special web page which contained a link to a potentially malicious script. A click on the link launches the script automatically. The script, in its turn, initializes the calculator.

There were several applications to participate in the contest, but only the CISSRT solution really worked proved to be original.

Nikita Tarakanov says that under Mac OS X the Safari vulnerability causes just the emergency shutdown of the browser. However, it is not an evidence of a higher security level of Mac OS X: the vulnerability cannot be exploited properly because of the difference in the way the two operation systems work with the memory.

The winner was awarded with a prize - a Toshiba laptop with installed Safari.

Earlier on, Safari had been hacked by the participants of the CanSecWest security conference, Vancouver, Canada, March 2011.