It took just 1 minute to hack into the ‘Google Pixel’ and execute malicious code remotely. By doing so, the hacker team not only won $ 120,000 ( Rs. 81 Lakhs ) but also won praise from Google, who had willingly signed up to be a partner in the ‘PwnFest’ organized in Seoul, South Korea. The winning team ‘Qihoo 360’ will now provide a detailed document that describes the vulnerability and step by step exploit technique along with the malicious code that was executed. Security experts from Google will review the exploit and develop a patch to fix it. The exploit will not be released in the public domain until the patch reaches every customer in the world.
Many tech companies resort to such white hacking events to find vulnerabilities in their software and fix them before any malicious attack is triggered. Though not much is available about the vulnerability in the Google Pixel but according to various reports the hackers were able to gain access to the phone’s contacts, email, photos and even card details.
The ‘Qihoo 360’ also hacked Adobe Flash using a win32K kernel flaw and won another $ 120,000 for it . The team walked with over $ 520,000 by winning various hacking hacking challenges. Apart from Google various other software giants including VMWare, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe participated in the ‘PwnFest’.
1 Comment