During the first day of Pwn2Own Austin 2021, contestants won $362,500 after exploiting previously unknown security flaws to hack printers, routers, NAS devices, and speakers from Canon, HP, Western Digital, Cisco, Sonos, TP-Link, and NETGEAR.
At Pwn2Own Austin, security researchers will target mobile phones, printers, routers, network-attached storage, smart speakers, televisions, external storage and other devices, all up-to-date and in their default configuration.
See also: Lawsuit against Canon for disabling scanning when printer runs out of ink
The only exception is Western Digital's 3TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud NAS device, as it's still running a beta software version.
Researchers can earn the highest rewards in the mobile category, where they can receive cash prizes of up to $150,000, with a $50,000 bonus if the iPhone or Pixel browser exploits are executed with kernel-level privileges, bringing the maximum prize for a single challenge to a total of $200,000.
The consumer-focused Pwn2Own Austin event expanded to four days after 22 different contestants registered for a total of 58 entries. The full competition schedule can be found here.
See also: Millions of HP OMEN PCs affected by a serious vulnerability
Teams DEVCORE and THEORI were the ones who earned the highest rewards during the first day of Pwn2Own in Austin.
DEVCORE's Orange Tsai (@orange_8361), Angelboy (@scwuaptx), and Meh Chang (@mehqq_) won a total of $100,000 after hacking the Sonos One Speaker and the Canon ImageCLASS MF644Cdw and HP Color LaserJet23 Pro MFPw printers.
The THEORI (@theori_io) team won another $80,000 after hacking Western Digital's My Cloud Pro Series PR4100 and 3TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud NAS devices.
The Samsung Galaxy S21 was the only device to be spared after Ken Gannon (@yogehi) of F-Secure Labs was unable to get his feat to work within the allotted time.
See also: HP's new 11-inch tablet announced
The full schedule for the first day of Pwn2Own Austin 2021 and the results after each challenge are listed here.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
