Mac Hack Contest Bug had Been Public for a Year
Ironically, Miller gave a presentation at the Black Hat security conference last year, arguing that one way to find bugs in Mac OS X would be to look for out-of-date open-source software that ships with the Mac and then to scan that project's files.
"I told Apple about this backporting problem then and they didn't listen and I didn't listen either, because we didn't find the bug by looking at changelogs, we found it with source code analysis," Miller said.
Although the focus of the PWN2OWN contest was on zero-day flaws, the fact that Miller exploited a flaw that was unpatched in Apple's products was enough to earn him the prize, conference organizers say.
That's a good thing, because when asked if he planned to return the prize money, Miller shot back the following: "No way. It's not my fault they don't fix their bugs."
