The much-vaunted Pwn2Own contest in Vancouver saw Safari fall in seconds, Internet Explorer taken out and a zero-day exploit in Firefox make it an unhappy day for three of computing's big guns.

The contest sees hackers try to win prizes by hacking into computers - with the software companies then given details of the methods in order to find solutions.

Apple's Safari, running on a MacBook survived only a matter of seconds after a user clicked on a link.

Win 7

A Sony Vaio machine running Windows 7 and, apparently, IE8, fell to what the organisers TippingPoint ZDI described as a brilliant IE8 bug.

Firefox was also taken down, with a security researched named Nils taking all three scalps – although he was only the second quickest to exploit Safari.

The quickest was Charlie Miller – who was also the fastest in taking down Apple's machine last year and he again gets to keep the laptop.

Via ZDNet