During the second day of Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, competitors earned $435,000 after exploiting zero-day bugs in multiple products, including Microsoft SharePoint, VMware ESXi, Oracle VirtualBox, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Mozilla Firefox.
The highlight was a successful attempt from Nguyen Hoang Thach of STARLabs SG against the VMware ESXi, which earned him $150,000 for an integer overflow exploit.
Dinh Ho Anh Khoa of Viettel Cyber Security was awarded $100,000 for hacking Microsoft SharePoint by leveraging an exploit chain combining an auth bypass and an insecure deserialization flaw.
Palo Alto Networks' Edouard Bochin and Tao Yan also demoed an out-of-bounds write zero-day in Mozilla Firefox, while Gerrard Tai of STAR Labs SG escalated privileges to root on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using a use-after-free bug, and Viettel Cyber Security used another out-of-bounds write for an Oracle VirtualBox guest-to-host escape.
In the AI category, Wiz Research security researchers used a use-after-free zero-day to exploit Redis and Qrious Secure chained four security flaws to hack Nvidia's Triton Inference Server.
On the first day, competitors were awarded $260,000 after successfully exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows 11, Red Hat Linux, and Oracle VirtualBox, reaching a total of $695,000 earned over the first two days of the contest after demonstrating 20 unique 0-days.
The Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 hacking competition focuses on enterprise technologies, introduces an AI category for the first time, and takes place during the OffensiveCon conference between May 15 and May 17.
A vulnerability categorized as “critical” in a photo app installed by default on Synology network-attached storage devices could give attackers the ability to steal data and worse.
DEVCORE research team found a 9-year-old WAN bug on RouterOS, the product of MikroTik. Combined with another bug of the Canon printer, DEVCORE becomes the first team ever to successfully complete an attack chain in the brand new SOHO Smashup category of Pwn2Own. And DEVCORE also won the title of Master of Pwn in Pwn2Own Toronto 2022.
In April 2021 I participated in Pwn2Own Vancouvver competition as a single player, and successfully demonstrated a 0-day virtual machine escape exploit with code execution on Parallels hypervisor. Today I am finally releasing the exploit source code together with a technical walkthrough video talk that I gave on Zero Day Engineering livestream in November 2021.
On the first day of Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024, contestants demoed Windows 11, Tesla, and Ubuntu Linux zero-day vulnerabilities and exploit chains to win $732,500 and a Tesla Model 3 car.
VMware this week released patches for a critical vulnerability disclosed at the Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023 hacking contest.
This post details the development of a guest-to-host virtualization escape for Parallels Desktop on macOS, as used in our successful Pwn2Own 2021 entry. Give...
