Safari and Internet Explorer were the browsers to be taken down in the Pwn2Own hacking contest.
Held annually at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, the competition pits security researchers against browsers. This year, Microsoft's IE8, Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome are all in the contest.
However, no researcher chose to take on Firefox, and the one that was expected to hack Chrome reportedly didn't show up.
The first browser to fall in the three-day hacking contest was Safari, running on 64-bit version of Mac OS X. It was cracked by a team from Vupen Security in five seconds - all the team had to do was point the browser at a site containing their malicious code to take advantage of a vulnerability in WebKit.
That flaw was yesterday fixed by Apple, but the patch came too late to make it into the browser for the contest.
The second browser to fall was IE8 running on a 64-bit version of Windows 7. It was hacked by researcher Stephen Fewer using a trio of vulnerabilities.
Both teams win a $15,000 prize plus the computer they were working on.
Chrome's part in the contest was to be different than the other browsers. It was initially not going to be included, but Google stumped up $20,000 for a prize - but only if hackers could crack the browser in the first day and escape Chrome's sandbox using a flaw in Google-written code.
For the second part of the contest, researchers will focus on smartphones.
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk
