Management & Strategy

Researchers Earn $270,000 for Firefox, Edge Hacks at Pwn2Own 2019

White hat hackers earned a total of $270,000 on the second day of the Pwn2Own hacking competition for demonstrating exploits against the Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge web browsers.

Eduard Kovacs

March 22, 2019

White hat hackers earned a total of $270,000 on the second day of the Pwn2Own hacking competition for demonstrating exploits against the Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge web browsers.

Amat Cama and Richard Zhu of team Fluoroacetate earned $50,000 for a Firefox exploit with kernel escalation. The attack involved a just-in-time (JIT) bug and an out-of-bounds write flaw in the Windows kernel.

Pwn2Own 2019 “They were able to execute code at SYSTEM level just by using Firefox to visit their specially crafted website,” explained Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the company that organizes Pwn2Own.

The same team also got $130,000 for a complex Edge hack that involved kernel escalation and a VM escape. The exploit leveraged a type confusion bug in Edge, a race condition in the kernel, and an out-of-bounds write issue in VMware Workstation. Combined, these flaws allow an attacker to go from a web browser running in a virtual machine to executing arbitrary code on the host operating system.

In the third entry of the second day of Pwn2Own 2019, Niklas Baumstark earned $40,000 for a JIT bug in Firefox and a logic flaw that allowed a sandbox escape.

“In a real-world scenario, an attacker could use this to run their code on a target system at the level of the logged-on user,” ZDI said.

Finally, Arthur Gerkis of Exodus Intelligence received $50,000 for a Microsoft Edge exploit with a sandbox escape. The attack relied on a double-free bug in the render component and a logic bug for bypassing the sandbox.

All of the nine vulnerabilities have been disclosed to vendors.

On the first day of the event, participants earned a total of $240,000 in cash for exploits targeting Apple’s Safari web browser and the Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Workstation virtualization products, which brings the total so far to just over half a million dollars.

The third day is dedicated to automotive hacking — researchers can receive up to $300,000 and a car if they can demonstrate the existence of previously unknown vulnerabilities in a Tesla Model 3.

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.

Latest News

Click to comment

Webinar: How to Build Resilience Against Emerging Cyber Threats

Thursday, March 16, 2023

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.

Webinar: Understanding Hidden Third-Party Identity Access Risks

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

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.

Tackling the Challenge of Actionable Intelligence Through Context

Making threat intelligence actionable requires more than automation; it also requires contextualization and prioritization. (Marc Solomon)

Malware Trends: What’s Old Is Still New

Many of the most successful cybercriminals are shrewd; they want good ROI, but they don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel to get it. (Derek Manky)

Are Encryption and Zero Trust Breaking Key Protections?

Compliance and ZTNA are driving encryption into every aspect of an organization’s network and enterprise and, in turn, forcing us to change how we think about protecting our environments. (Matt Wilson)

How the Best CISOs Drive Operational Resilience

Cyberattacks have exposed a myriad of vulnerabilities in our healthcare infrastructure, and will continue to do so as new and innovative medical technologies are developed. (Galina Antova)

Defeating the Deepfake Danger

Deepfakes are becoming increasingly popular with cybercriminals, and as these technologies become even easier to use, organizations must become even more vigilant. (Derek Manky)

Application Security

Source Code Security Firm Cycode Launches With $4.6 Million in Funding

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Eduard KovacsSeptember 24, 2019

Management & Strategy

The Effect of Cybersecurity Layoffs on Cybersecurity Recruitment

SecurityWeek examines how a layoff-induced influx of experienced professionals into the job seeker market is affecting or might affect, the skills gap and recruitment...

Kevin TownsendJanuary 30, 2023