Pwn2Own – Over 1 million dollars in Bounties, Samsung Galaxy S21 hacked twice, Printer plays AC/DC

by | Nov 8, 2021 | News

Pwn2Own zero day bug bounties Samsung Galaxy S21 hacked

Post Views: 747

Reading Time: 1 Minute

Trend Micro’s ZDI has awarded $1,081,250 for 61 zero-days exploited at Pwn2Own Austin 2021, with competitors successfully pwning the Samsung Galaxy S21 again and hacking an HP LaserJet printer to play AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on the contest’s third day.

Contestants earned $70,000 during the fourth day, $238,750 on the third day, $415,000 on the second, and $362,500 during the first day.

The Synacktiv team won the contest after getting $197,000 in cash for their zero-days and 20 Master of Pwn points, with a six-point lead over the DEVCORE team, which finished with 14 points and earned a total of $140,000.

Over the four days of competition, the contestants compromised printers, routers, NAS devices, and speakers from Canon, HP, Western Digital, Cisco, Sonos, TP-Link, and NETGEAR after exploiting 61 previously unknown security flaws known as zero-day vulnerabilities.

The full Pwn2Own Austin 2021 schedule and the results following each challenge are available here.

*Pwn2Own Austin 2021 final leaderboard (ZDI)*

Sam Thomas (@_s_n_t) from team Pentest Limited (@pentestltd) was the one who compromised the Samsung Galaxy S21 running the latest Android 11 security updates on the third day using a unique three-bug chain and earning $50,000.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 escaped a hacking attempt on the first day after F-Secure Labs’ Ken Gannon didn’t get his zero-day exploit to work within the allotted time.

Mr L and Nguyễn Hoàng Thạch (@hi_im_d4rkn3ss) of STARLabs were able to get code execution on the Samsung Galaxy S21 on the second day of Pwn2Own.

However, despite their success and winning $25,000, their attempt was tagged as a “collision” after it was revealed that they used a bug known to the vendor.

The third day of Pwn2Own also saw the F-Secure Labs team turning an HP LaserJet printer into a jukebox using a stack-based buffer overflow to play AC/DC’s Thunderstruck.

(Sound On) Confirmed! The team from @FSecureLabs used a stack-based buffer overflow to take over an HP LaserJet and turn it into a jukebox. Their efforts earn them $20,000 and 2 Master of Pwn points. #Pwn2Own https://t.co/3kqn5Cr7Y4
— Zero Day Initiative (@thezdi) November 4, 2021

At this edition of Pwn2Own, competitors targeted mobile phones, printers, routers, network-attached storage (NAS), smart speakers, TVs, external storage, and other devices, all up to date and running default configurations.

Western Digital’s 3TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud NAS device was the only exception to this rule, as it runs a beta software release.

This year’s edition of Pwn2Own Austin’s consumer-focused event is the first to be extended to four days after 22 different contestants registered for 58 total entries.

You can find recap videos for all four days of Pwn2Own embedded below.