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March 8, 2013

Pwn2Own ends with Oracle Java, Reader and Adobe Flash exploits


googleDay two of the Pwn2Own competition at CanSecWest was again successful for French Vupen security, as they succeeded in exploiting Adobe Flash on Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 by chaining together three zero-days (an overflow, a ASLR bypass technique and a IE9 sandbox memory corruption) and earning themselves another $70,000.

George Hotz exploited Adobe Reader XI (also on IE 9 on Win7), and Ben Murphy - the last contestant to target Java - has also managed to earn a prize even though he wasn't there, because James Forshaw, a winner from the previous day, agreed to serve as proxy and demonstrate the attack.

All in all, ZDI has awarded over half a million dollars in cash prizes and, of course, the compromised laptops and ZDI reward points.

The Google financed Pwnium hacking contest - also held at CanSecWest - this year requires contestants to "break" Chrome OS but has so far not witnessed a successful exploitation.

In the meantime, Mozilla has already fixed the use-after-free zero-day flaw exploited yesterday by Vupen Security, and Google has issued a Chrome update that fixes the flaws discovered by the MWR Labs team.

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That Ben Murphy has been credited by Oracle with finding and reporting multiple vulnerabilities in Java. Congratulations to him for picking up $20k in this competition as he has provided them with plenty of free "heads up" in the past.

The industry is much blessed when it has people of Ben's obvious calibre providing such an invaluable service to maintain the integrity of systems in such a vulnerable environment.

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