Pwn2Own 2021: Zoom, Teams, Exchange, Chrome and Edge full pwned

The North American Pwn2Own event has taken place alongside the annual CanSecWest security conference held in Vancouver, Canada, but this year the official host city was Austin, Texas.

Due to the pandemic situation, the hacking teams were distributed all over the world, rather than all traveling to meet in one place.

The full results for 2021 can be found on the Pwn2Own blog, including those who tried but failed, or those who tried but didn’t win any money because some part of their exploit chain was already known.

In some cases, competitors lost out because their exploits had been reported to the vendor before the competition by someone else, but not yet publicly disclosed.

On the other side, they lost out simply through the bad luck of drawing a later slot in the competition than other participants who had brought along and exploited the same bugs.

Below, we can see the money-winning entries – note that this year’s prize money totaled a very healthy $1.21 million!

• $200k for code execution on a server or messaging platform
• $100k for code execution via a browser
• $40k for breaking out of a virtualized guest OS into the host OS
• $40k for “getting root” (more properly, SYSTEM) on Windows 10
• $30k for “getting root” on Linux

Particpant                    Platform            Pwnership level   Prize
----------------------------  ------------------  ----------------  --------
DEVCORE                       Microsoft Exchange  Server takeover   $200,000
'OV’                          Microsoft Teams     Remote code exec  $200,000
Daan Keuper/Thijs Alkemade    Zoom Messenger      Remote code exec  $200,000
Bruno Keith/Niklas Baumstark  Chrome and Edge     Remote code exec  $100,000
Jack Dates                    Apple Safari        Kernel code exec  $100,000
Jack Dates                    Parallels Desktop   Escape to host     $40,000
Sunjoo Park                   Parallels Desktop   Escape to host     $40,000
Dao Lao                       Parallels Desktop   Escape to host     $40,000
Benajmin McBride              Parallels Desktop   Escape to host     $40,000
Team Viettel                  Windows 10          EoP to SYSTEM      $40,000
Tao Yan                       Windows 10          EoP to SYSTEM      $40,000
'z3r09’                       Windows 10          EoP to SYSTEM      $40,000
Marcin Wiazowski              Windows 10          EoP to SYSTEM      $40,000
Ryota Shiga                   Ubuntu Desktop      EoP to root        $30,000
Manfred Paul                  Ubuntu Desktop      EoP to root        $30,000
Vincent Dehors                Ubuntu Desktop      EoP to root        $30,000
                                                           =================
                                                           TOTAL  $1,210,000

There was a tenth product that was attacked in the competition, but that doesn’t show up in the list above because it remained unpwned within the allotted time: Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualization software.

You can watch recordings of all three Pwn2Own 2021 contest days below.