China's Keen Team Topples Safari, Flash at Pwn2Own

VANCOUVER – One is the bug hunter, the other the exploit specialist. Fang Jiahong and Liang Chen represented the Keen Team at Pwn2Own on Thursday, starting off the second day of the annual exploit festival with a quick takedown of Apple’s Safari browser. They then wrapped up the contest with a...

Charitable Prelude to Pwn2Own Not Without Its Critics

VANCOUVER – The prelude to the annual Pwn2Own contest between sponsor HP’s Zero Day Initiative and Pwnium contest sponsor Google produced not only zero-day exploits for Internet Explorer and Safari, but some skepticism about whether the exploits and details on the vulnerabilities were held for th...

Vupen Cashes in Four Times at Pwn2Own 2014

VANCOUVER – It’s become a familiar walk for Chaouki Bekrar. Year after year at the Pwn2Own contest, the controversial Vupen founder is scurried from a small room in the basement of the Sheraton hotel to a suite several floors above. It’s a short journey from where a string of zero-day exploits ar...

Cisco Grand Challenge to Fix Internet of Things Security

As seemingly every new gadget and electronic device is coming retrofitted with an Internet connection these days – appliances, cars and medical devices a few chief examples, the floodgates have opened ever wider for an alarming number of new attack vectors. The burgeoning evolution of “Internet o...

Cisco Offers $300,000 Prize For 'Internet of Things' Security Apps

In the last few years, this emerging domain for the Internet of Things has been attracting the significant interest, and will continue for the years to come. It would be a $20 Trillion Market over the next several years, but Security and privacy are the key issues for such applications, and still...

Google adds its Chrome apps and extensions to Bug Bounty Program

Google's Vulnerability Reward Program which started in November 2010, offers a hefty reward to the one who find a good vulnerability in its products. Now Google is getting a little more serious about the security of its Chrome Browser and has expanded its Bug Bounty Program to include all Chrome...

Pwn2Own To Pay $150,000 Grand Prize for Microsoft EMET Bypass

Microsoft has not been shy in the past nine months about advising users to install and use its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit EMET as a temporary mitigation until zero-day vulnerabilities are patched. Experts have advised enterprises and smaller organizations to deploy EMET as a proactive...

Hacker 'Pinkie Pie' successfully compromised Chrome on Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy S4

A Mysterious Hacker who goes by the "Pinkie Pie" handle is rewarded with $50,000 USD for hacking into the Google Chrome browser for Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy S4. At Information Security Conference PacSec 2013 in Tokyo, during the HP's Pwn2Own contest, a zero-day exploit showcased by "Pinkie Pie"...

Hackers Pool Money and Offer it For iPhone Fingerprint Hack

UPDATE: In an earlier version of this story, we failed to give proper credit to Robert Graham for his involvement in this project. A group of researchers, hackers, and other security enthusiast are pooling their money and offering it as a bounty to the first person that can successfully crack the...

Mobile Pwn2Own Offers $300k For Zero Days

It’s a good time to be a security researcher. If you have the time and talent to find vulnerabilities in widely deployed applications, there is a lot of money out there for the taking, and not just from the bug bounty programs and regular exploit buyers. The latest iteration of the Pwn2Own hackin...

Проверь Badoo на прочность! Месяц поиска уязвимостей

Цитата: Компания Badoo, вслед за своими коллегами ― крупнейшими представителями IT-индустрии, такими как Google, Facebook и Яндекс, начинает платить за найденные уязвимости. Мы объявляем конкурс «Проверь Badoo на прочность!», который стартует 19 марта и продлится ровно месяц. Участвовать в конкур...

Google Serves Up a Half Slice of Pwnium Cash for Pinkie Pie

Depending upon your perspective, the third iteration of Google Pwnium at this year’s CanSecWest conference was either a mild failure or a huge success. No researchers were able to come up with a full compromise of the Chrome OS, the target in this year’s contest, but Google said this week that it...

Mozilla and Google Patch Browser Flaws Used in Pwn2Own

VANCOUVER–Within less than 24 hours of the vulnerabilities being used and disclosed to them, both Mozilla and Google have issued patches for flaws employed by participants in this week’s Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest here. Mozilla has rolled out a new version of Firefox that includes fixes for...

Firefox, Java, Flash All Taken Down at Pwn2Own

VANCOUVER–Finding and exploiting new vulnerabilities in the major browsers has become a difficult exercise for security researchers, thanks to the exploit mitigations, sandboxes and other protections that Microsoft, Google and Mozilla have added in the last few years. The same has become true of...

Chaouki Bekrar

The team from French research firm VUPEN, including CEO Chaouki Bekrar, has dominated the Pwn2Own hacking contest, taking down several targets, including Internet Explorer 10, Java and Mozilla Firefox. They plan to attack Adobe Flash on Thursday...

Google Announces Pwnium 3, Ups Ante and Offers $3M+ in Rewards

Search giant Google is planning a third iteration of its vulnerability-finding contest, Pwnium. This year’s competition is set to be held alongside next month’s CanSecWest security conference on March 7 in Vancouver, BC. Unlike last year’s inaugural Pwnium, which was parallel to CanSecWest’s olde...

Pwn2Own Rules Change Again, Flash, Java Now Fair Game for Contestants

For the second year in row, the organizers of the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the CanSecWest conference have changed up the rules, this time making the browser plug-ins that have been frequent targets for attackers for years fair game for the contestants, as well. Adobe Flash, Reader and Oracle’s...

Penetration Testing Frequently Asked Questions

You may have noticed this recent article about Googles contest that rewarded a hacker for discovering a vulnerability in Chrome. Once Google verified the vulnerability, they were able to fix the bug and issue the cash prize to the hacker. This is a very public example similar to what Coalfire Lab...

PinkiePie Strikes Again, Compromises Google Chrome in Pwnium Contest at Hack in the Box

For the second time this year, an anonymous teenage security researcher has succeeded in producing a full exploit, including a sandbox escape, against Google Chrome. The researcher, who uses the pseudonym PinkiePie, submitted his exploit Wednesday during the Pwnium contest run by Google at the Ha...

As Bug Bounty Programs Mature, Still More Room For Growth

Google’s recent announcements that the company is doubling some of the rewards in its Chromium Vulnerability Reward Program and will also be committing up to $2 million for another round of the Pwnium contest in a couple of months brought a round of cheers from the security research community. Th...