All Major Web Browsers Fall in Pwn2Own Hacking Contest
March 20, 2015 – 5:25 PMSecurity researchers nabbed $552,500 in bounties at this year’s Pwn2Own hacking contest, demonstrating exploits against the top four Web browsers, plus Adobe Reader and Flash Player.
On Thursday, the second and final day of the competition, the star of the show was South Korean security researcher JungHoon Lee, aka “lokihardt,” who nabbed the single biggest payout of the competition and Pwn2Own history: $75,000 for a Chrome bug affecting both the stable and beta versions of Google’s browser. For that same bug, he also earned an extra $25,000 for gaining SYSTM access, and another $10,000 for hitting the beta version for a grand total of $110,000.
“To put it another way, lokihardt earned roughly $916 a second for his two-minute demonstration,” HP’s security research team wrote in a blog post Thursday. “There are times when ‘Wow’ just isn’t enough.”
Sponsored by HP’s Zero Day Initiative program, the Pwn2Own contest takes place at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada. All told, the hackers who participated in this year’s event discovered five bugs in the Windows operating system; four in Internet Explorer 11; three each in Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader and Flash; two in Apple’s Safari; and the one aforementioned bug in Chrome.
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