Apple’s Safari Web browser was hacked within five seconds of visiting a specially crafted Web site.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]The hack for Safari allowed a team of French security experts win this year’s Pwn2Own hacker challenge, according to ZDNet. The researchers won $15,000 in cash and an Apple MacBook Air 13-inch running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

The MacBook that was hacked was running a fully updated 64-bit version of Mac OS X. It’s not clear if the version of Safari used was the updated version from earlier today or an older one.

The researchers said that WebKit, Safari’s rendering engine, has many vulnerabilities.

After running the exploit, the researchers were able to launch the calculator app and write a file to the disk.

“The victim visits a web page, he gets owned. No other interaction is needed,” said Chaouki Bekrar, one of the researchers.