It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.

He took the first of three laptop computers -- and a $10,000 cash prize -- Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.

Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a previously undisclosed "0day" attack.

Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organizers using the computers to do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.

The MacBook was the only system to be hacked by Thursday, however, the word on the show floor is that the Linux and Vista systems will meet with some serious challenges on Friday.

Update: Shane Macaulay from Security Objectives has just won the Fujitsu U810 laptop running Vista Ultimate SP1 and $5,000 after it was installed with the latest version of Adobe Flash. Shane received some assistance from his friends Derek Callaway (also from Security Objectives) and Alexander Sotirov. The new Adobe Flash 0day vulnerability that Shane exploited has been acquired by the Zero Day Initiative, and has been responsibly disclosed to Adobe who is now working on the issue.