The one thing that stands out for me about owners of Apple products are their passion. Apple users, computers owners especially, absolutely love their hardware. It’s something that you don’t generally see in PC users.

Case in point is John Gruber, who writes the awesome Daring Fireball weblog. A few weeks ago, two ’security experts’, David Maynor and John Ellch demonstrated via a video at the Black Hat security conference how they hijacked a Macbook via its Airport. Brian Krebs then published an article about the hijacking with the sensational headline, “Hijacking a Macbook in 60 seconds or less” in his Washington Post column.

Now, Gruber is one of those passionate Mac users and had been analysing and refuting Maynor and Ellch’s demonstrations, especially when it was discovered that the pair used a third party WiFi card in the demo and not the built-in Airport as they had claimed (part 1, part 2, part 3).

Maynor, Ellch and Krebs have been relatively quiet and have not made an official response to Gruber. So for the sake of proving that Macs are, in fact, the most secure computers commercially available, Gruber has put up an open challenge to the so-called security experts.

The challenge issued by John Gruber: If you can hijack a brand-new MacBook out of the box, it’s yours to keep.

My take? There’s no way Maynor and Ellch will bite because it will only tear down their credibility further. Also, something interesting - if you read that infamous article, one of the first things this security expert says is

We’re not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those ‘Get a Mac’ commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something

They’re Apple haters, plain and simple. They’re unhappy about Apple and so they resort to faking a demo and sensationalising it. Now they’ve been called out. Suckerz.