White hat hackers earn over $1 Million at Pwn2Own Austin 2021

The Zero Day Initiative’s Pwn2Own Austin 2021 hacking contest has ended, and participants earned $1,081,250 for 61 zero-day flaws.

Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative’s Pwn2Own Austin 2021 hacking contest has ended, the participants earned a total of $1,081,250 for 61 zero-day exploits. The participants compromised NAS devices, mobile phones, printers, routers, and speakers from Canon, Cisco, HP, NETGEAR, Samsung, Sonos, TP-Link, and Western Digital.

This edition is the largest Pwn2Own to date, the participants earned $362,500 on the first day of the contest, $415,000 on the second day, $238,750 on the third day, and $60,000 on the last day.

The highest bounties were paid out for zero-day exploits for Sonos One smart speaker, two teams earned $60,000 each for code execution issues.

Congratulation to the Synacktiv team that won the contest and earned $197,000 for their zero-days and 20 Master of Pwn points.

For the first time in the history of the hacking contest, white hat hackers demonstrated zero-day exploits for printers. The participants demonstrated 11 printer hacks, on the third day a team hacked an HP LaserJet printer to play the AC/DC’s Thunderstruck song.

In this edition participants also hacked the Samsun Galaxy S21, Sam Thomas (@_s_n_t) from team Pentest Limited (@pentestltd) demonstrated a zero-day exploit chain for the latest Android 11 earning $50,000.

There was also one partially successful attempt to hack the Samsung Galaxy S21, Mr L and Nguyễn Hoàng Thạch (@hi_im_d4rkn3ss) of STARLabs Team used an exploit chain that included a bug known by the vendor. They still earn $25,000 and 2.5 Master of Pwn points.

The day-by-day results for the Pwn2Own Austin 2021 are available here.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, supply chain attack)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.