Hackers at Pwn2Own to compete for $100K in prizes

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 research team lead, 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.

:story: Computerworld