Government-Funded Hackers Say They’ve Already Defeated Windows 8’s New Security Measures
Government-Funded Hackers Say They’ve Already Defeated Windows 8’s New Security Measures
Last week’s Windows 8 launch wasn’t just a major product release for Microsoft. It seems to have been a banner day for the government-funded hackers who take Microsoft’s software apart, too.
On Tuesday the French firm Vupen, whose researchers develop software hacking techniques and sell them to government agency customers, announced that it had already developed an exploit that could take over a Window 8 machine running Internet Explorer 10, in spite of the many significant security upgrades Microsoft built into the latest version of its operating system.
“We welcome #Windows 8 with various 0Ds combined to pwn all new Win8/IE10 exploit mitigations,” Vupen’s chief executive Chaouki Bekrar wrote on twitter Tuesday, using an abbreviation for the industry term “zero-days” to refer to security vulnerabilities unknown to Microsoft that his team has discovered in the company’s software, as well as the hacker slang “pwn”-to hack or take control of a machine.
Bekrar’s claim follows up on his promise earlier in the month that Vupen would be ready to compromise Windows 8 immediately upon its launch: “Windows 8 will be officially released by MS on Oct 26th, we’ll release to customers the 1st exploit for Win8 the same day #CoordinatedPwnage”