bennyboy64 writes “An Australian university appears to be excelling at cultivating some of Australia’s best computer hackers. Following the University of NSW’s students recently placing first, second and third in a hacking war game (the first place winners also won first place last year), The Sydney Morning Herald reports on what exactly about the NSW institution is breeding some of Australia’s best hackers. It finds that a lecturer and mentor to the students with controversial views on responsible disclosure appears to the be the reason for their success.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Editor’s note: Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of 
It’s only been about six hours since our Disrupt NY Hackathon officially began, and we’re starting to see our intrepid hackers hit their stride. Granted, some of them are a little farther along than others — Darrell found one guy who made an 
Most developers are famously not great designers, but some of the best products come from teams where developers know a bit about design and the designers know a bit about what the developers do. 
PSA to all Facebook Camera users on iOS: If you haven’t update you app in the past few days, update it now. The older version of the app, pre-1.1.2 and released before December 21, has a security loophole. When used over WiFi networks, malicious hackers can tap the network and hijack Camera users’ accounts, picking up information like email addresses and passwords in the process. The white-hat hacker who ID’d the problem is Mohamed Ramadan, an Egypt-based security researcher and trainer with Attack-Secure who has also found and reported vulnerabilities for Apple, Google, and Etsy — which apparently also had the same loophole in its iOS app. Ramadan tells us that the issue lied in the Camera app’s Secure Sockets Layer certification, which was too open. As he puts it, “The problem is the app accepts any SSL certification from any source, even evil SSL certifications and this enables any attacker to perform Man in The Middle Attack against anyone uses Facebook Camera App for IPhone. This means that the application doesn’t warn the user if someone in the same [WiFi network] trying to hijack his Facebook account.” Testing his theory by using a proxy to listen in on a WiFi network, he was able to type in his username and password into the Camera app, and then see that information appear via the proxy. Ramadan notes that he’s tested all Facebook apps and the rest appear to protect from this similar vulnerability. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment but haven’t received a response.
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