Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

ICS/OT

ICS Exploits Earn Hackers $400,000 at Pwn2Own Miami 2022

ICS Pwn2Own 2022

Pwn2Own Miami 2022, a hacking contest focusing on industrial control systems (ICS), has come to an end, with contestants earning a total of $400,000 for their exploits.

ICS Pwn2Own 2022

Pwn2Own Miami 2022, a hacking contest focusing on industrial control systems (ICS), has come to an end, with contestants earning a total of $400,000 for their exploits.

The contest, organized by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), saw 11 contestants demonstrating their exploits in the OPC UA Server, Control Server, Human Machine Interface, and Data Gateway categories.

Participants demonstrated a total of 26 unique zero-day exploits against products from Unified Automation, Iconics, Inductive Automation, Prosys, Aveva, Triangle MicroWorks, OPC Foundation, Kepware, and Softing.

A majority of the 32 hacking attempts were successful — two failed and eight involved previously known bugs. These “bug collisions” still earned participants $5,000 for each attempt.

The white hat hackers who attended the event earned either $20,000, typically for remote code execution vulnerabilities, or $5,000, for DoS vulnerabilities. There was only one exception. The Computest Sector 7 team earned $40,000 for successfully bypassing the trusted application check on the OPC UA .NET standard.

This was the maximum amount that Pwn2Own participants could earn for a single exploit, and Computest’s attempt involved what ZDI described as one of the most interesting bugs ever seen at Pwn2Own. In fact, the Computest team earned the most points and a total of $90,000.

In 2020, at the first edition of the ICS-themed Pwn2Own, participants earned a total of $280,000. This event was not held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pwn2Own Miami 2022 took place between April 19 and April 21 alongside the S4x22 ICS security conference.

Related: Serious Vulnerability Exploited at Hacking Contest Impacts Over 200 HP Printers

Related: Device Exploits Earn Hackers Over $1 Million at Pwn2Own Austin 2021

Related: $1.9 Million Paid Out for Exploits at China’s Tianfu Cup Hacking Contest

Written By

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.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

Cloud Security

VMware vRealize Log Insight vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to take full control of a target system.

Application Security

A CSRF vulnerability in the source control management (SCM) service Kudu could be exploited to achieve remote code execution in multiple Azure services.

IoT Security

Lexmark warns of a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability impacting over 120 printer models, for which PoC code has been published.

CISO Strategy

Cybersecurity-related risk is a top concern, so boards need to know they have the proper oversight in place. Even as first-timers, successful CISOs make...