IoT Security

Bug Hunters Hack Samsung Galaxy S10, Xiaomi Mi9 at Pwn2Own

Pwn2Own Tokyo 2019 has come to an end and on the second day of the hacking contest bug bounty hunters have earned a total of $120,000 for demonstrating exploits against Samsung Galaxy S10 and Xiaomi Mi9 phones and TP-Link AC1750 routers.

Eduard Kovacs

November 7, 2019

Of the seven hacking attempts scheduled for day two, four were a complete success. Amat Cama and Richard Zhu of the Fluoroacetate team earned $50,000 for pushing an arbitrary file onto a Samsung Galaxy S10 after the device connected to their rogue base station. At the end of the day, they made a second attempt to hack the Galaxy S10, via its web browser, but they exploited a vulnerability that had already been used by a previous contestant.

Amat Cama and Richard Zhu of Fluoroacetate

Zhu and Cama have earned a total of $195,000 over the two days of Pwn2Own and they have been declared the winner for the third year in a row.

Pedro Ribeiro and Radek Domanski of Team Flashback earned $20,000 for hacking a TP-Link AC1750 router through its WAN interface. The same router was also hacked by the F-Secure Labs team, which also earned $20,000. Both teams managed to achieve arbitrary code execution on the device.

The F-Secure team also received $30,000 for an exploit targeting the Xiaomi Mi9 phone. They exploited a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the device’s NFC component to exfiltrate data simply by touching a specially made NFC tag.

In total, over two days, Pwn2Own contestants received $315,000 for disclosing 18 different vulnerabilities, all of which have been reported to the impacted vendors. They have been given 90 days to patch the security flaws.

On the first day of the event, participants took home a total of $195,000 for hacking Samsung and Sony smart TVs, Galaxy S10 and Mi9 phones, TP-Link and Netgear routers, and an Amazon Echo. The Amazon Echo exploit earned Fluoroacetate $60,000, which represented the biggest payout for a single exploit.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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