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 .
Read this full article at CIO Magazine
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