$10,000 MacBook hack was a known, year-old exploit

A gentleman recently won $10,000 for hacking a MacBook Air using an exploit in the Safari Web browser. This was during a laptop hacking contest and it made news all over the Internet.

As it turns out, the exploit he used had been known for a year, it was part of the Perl Compatibility Regular Expressions library, a piece of open-source software included with OSX that many Apple applications use, including Safari.

The developers who manage the PCRE patched the exploit months ago, the patch wasn’t part of OSX updates until late last week, though the latest security update does include the patch.

That means those fearing security problems with their OSX computers need only to update to abate those terrors.