A hacking contest next month will award cash prizes of $15,000 to anyone who can break into an iPhone, BlackBerry Bold, Droid or Nokia smartphone. The prizes are 50% more than the top awards given last year at Pwn2Own, which will kick off March 24 at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Altogether, $100,000 could be handed out by 3Com TippingPoint, the contest sponsor. . Pwn2Own will again offer a dual-track challenge with both browser and mobile OS targets, said Aaron Portnoy, a TippingPoint security researcher, on a company blog that announced details of this year's contest. Now in its fourth year, Pwn2Own has repeatedly made headlines for hacks of Apple 's Mac OS X and Microsoft 's Internet Explorer. In 2009, for example, researcher Charlie Miller broke into a Mac in less than five seconds to win $5,000. This year, hackers will take on an iPhone 3GS, a Blackberry Bold 9700, an unspecified Nokia smartphone running the Symbian S60 platform and a Motorola, most likely a Droid, powered by Google 's Android. A successful hack must result in code execution with little to no user-interaction, according to Portnoy. Any exploited phone wins its attacker $10,000 in cash, the phone and enough points in TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) bug-bounty program to qualify for another one-time payment of $5,000. But the $60,000 that TippingPoint plans to put up for the mobile part of Pwn2Own may be safe: All five smartphones in last year's contest came through unscathed . The link for this article located at CIO Magazine is no longer available. . Pwn2Own announces a total of $100,000 up for grabs in rewards for successfully hacking mobile operating systems and web browsers this year, boosting the focus on security vigilance.. Pwn2Own, Hacking Competition, Mobile Security, Browser Exploit, Cash Prizes. . Anthony Pell
It seems we exaggerated the innovation of Com/TippingPoint’s controversial Zero Day Initiative. The scheme pays vetted researchers to report vulnerabilities to the company in a responsible way, thereby avoiding these holes getting into the public domain and being exploited by criminals and hackers before patch has been written. . The link for this article located at HackInTheBox is no longer available. . The link for this article located at HackInTheBox is no longer available.. seems, exaggerated, innovation, com/tippingpoint’s, controversial, initiative. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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