Hacking

Pwn2Own Miami hacking contest awarded $400,000 for 26 unique ICS exploits

Which hat hackers that participated in the Pwn2Own Miami 2022 hacking contest earned a total of $400,000 for their ICS exploits.

The Pwn2Own Miami 2022 is a hacking contest organized by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) that focuses on demonstrating exploits for ICS systems belonging to the following categories: the OPC UA Server, Control Server, Human Machine Interface, and Data Gateway.

During the three days of competition, 11 participants made 32 attempts of demonstrating their ICS exploits against products from Unified Automation, Iconics, Inductive Automation, Prosys, Aveva, Triangle MicroWorks, OPC Foundation, Kepware, and Softing.

Participants demonstrated a total of 26 unique zero-day exploits, only two attempts failed and the other eight were classified as BUG COLLISION, which means that the white hat hackers successfully demonstrated the ICS exploits but they were using already known issues.

Each “bug collision” attempt was awarded a payout of $5,000, while remote code execution were awarded $20,000 on average. The payout for DoS ICS exploits was $5,000.

Daan Keuper (@daankeuper) and Thijs Alkemade (@xnyhps) from Computest Sector 7 (@sector7_nl) demonstrated how to bypass the trusted application check on the OPC Foundation OPC UA .NET Standard and earned $40,000 and 40 Master of Pwn points.

The Computest Sector 7 team won Master of Pwn for Pwn2Own Miami 2022 and earned a total of $90,000.

“Pwn2Own Miami for 2022 has wrapped up, and it was an amazing three days of competition. In total, we awarded $400,000 for 26 unique 0-days (plus a few bug collisions). With 90 points accumulated over three days, the team of Daan Keuper (@daankeuper) and Thijs Alkemade (@xnyhps) from Computest Sector 7 (@sector7_nl) have won Master of Pwn!” reads the post from ZDI.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Pwn2Own Miami 2022)

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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”.

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