High-end hackers are usually wanted by the police, especially if the target is big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, and so on. But a group of hackers who managed to break into Windows 11 and Microsoft Teams were instead rewarded with a prize of USD 800,000.
These hackers are contestants in the Pwn2Own hacking competition which was held last week. In the 15th contest held in Vancouver, Canada, a team of hackers managed to find dozens of zero-day bugs in popular products such as Windows 11, Firefox, Oracle Virtualbox, and others.
Pwn2Own Vancouver 2022 is a hacking competition that lasts for three days and is sponsored directly by leading technology companies such as Microsoft, Zoom, and many more.
Teams of hackers or security researchers are challenged to find zero-day loopholes in these companies' software to win prize money totaling millions of dollars.
Actually this kind of practice is common. Many companies have bug bounty programs that promise to reward hackers if they find a security hole that has not been detected before. The difference is, Pwn2Own is bigger and more prestigious.
The prize money that the hacker won was only from the first day of Pwn2Own. On the second day, contestants took home USD 195,000 after demonstrating a security flaw in the Tesla Model 3, Ubuntu Desktop, and Windows 11 entertainment systems.
On the third and final day, the hacker team earned $160,000 after disabling Windows 11 and Ubuntu Desktop. In total, this competition distributed prizes of USD 1.15 million to 17 contestants.
After a security vulnerability has been successfully exploited and reported during the Pwn2Own competition, the company has up to 90 days to release a fix before it is publicly disclosed by Trend Micro.