During the PWN2OWN security competition the hacker best known for hacking the iPhone, discusses hacking fully patched Macbooks in under 2 min shares some information.
Yes, I took down the Mac in under a minute each time. However, this doesn’t show the fact that I spent many days doing research and writing the exploit before the day of the competition. It only looks Hollywood because you don’t see the hard work in the preparation. If you set me down in front of an application I’ve never seen before and told me I have 2 minutes to hack it, as is often the case in movies, I’d have no more luck than your grandma at accomplishing it. Well, maybe a little more of a chance, but not much!
As for comparing this to other competitions, most other competitions face teams of hackers against programs written for the contest with bugs purposely added. I like Pwn2Own because its against real software and the bugs found are real bugs and are given to the vendors to fix, so some good comes out of it too.
