A team of Chinese hackers hacked the Google Pixel alongside Apple Safari and Adobe Flash at the PwnFest hacking competition in Seoul on Friday.
Google’s latest offering was smashed by white-hat hackers from Qihoo 360, who demonstrated a proof-of-concept exploit that used a zero-day vulnerability in order to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on the target smartphone.
The exploit then launched the Google Play store before opening Chrome and displaying a web page reading “Pwned By 360 Alpha Team”.
This won them a nice $120,000 cash prize and Google will now work to patch the vulnerability.
It was the second time in as many weeks that the Pixel has been compromised.
The first still-unpatched zero day was developed by Qihoo 360 rival Keen Team of Tencent at the Mobile Pwn2Own event in Japan.
Hackers there showcased the exploit at the PwnFest hacking event in Seoul today showing how they could compromise all aspects of the phone including contacts, photos, messages, and phone calls.
Apple’s updated Safari browser running on MacOS Sierra also fell. Respected Chinese hacker outfit Pangu Team renowned for releasing million-dollar persistent modern iOS jailbreaks for free, along with hacker JH, blasted Cupertino’s web browser with a root privilege escalation zero day that took 20 seconds to run, earning the team $80,000.
Qihoo 360 also breached Adobe Flash with a flick of the finger, digging up a combination decade-old, use-after-free zero day and a win32k kernel flaw to score $120,000.
It took four seconds for Flash to fall.
The hacks conclude the PwnFest whitewash, which saw Microsoft Edge hacked and the first-ever zero day exploits against VMWare Workstation on Thursday.
Qihoo 360 hackers walked away with a total of $520,000 in prize money.
