Facebook is opening its Portal videoconferencing hardware to hackers for the first time at the upcoming Pwn2Own Tokyo competition. The Social Network will be providing the headliner for the hacking contest, allowing contestants to demonstrate working exploits that can achieve either remote code execution or, barring that, …

RoundupThis week we got freaked out about heart implant hacks, welcomed a new Microsoft security tool, and endured yet another Facebook fsck up. Here's what else happened along the way: Slack pack give keys a whack Large enterprise customers will now have more control over the security of their Slack channels. This after the …

RoundupThe lingering fallout of security flaws in AMD processor chipsets has dominated the news this week, and it ain't over yet. The initial flaw disclosure on Tuesday was short on details and high on hype, and some thought that either the issue was massively overhyped or was being used to try and manipulate AMD's stock price. The …

UpdatedFriday is usually a good day to bury bad news and there are a number of stories bubbling under before we all head out for the weekend. US Secret Service lost a laptop The US Secret Service has admitted that one of its agents' cars had been broken into by persons unknown, and a laptop was stolen, along with other items. The …

Power of CommunityIf Jung Hoon Lee is not the world's best hacker, he can't be far from the top of the dais: the 22 year-old South Korean better known as Lokihardt has an uncanny knack for finding zero-day exploits in the world's most popular and most secure systems. Lee is a fixture at global hacking competitions like Pwn2Own and PwnFest where …

The Nexus 6P appears to have been hacked with attackers at the Mobile Pwn2Own contest installing malware without user interaction in less than five minutes. The hack by China's Keen Team happened minutes ago at the Tokyo event and does not require users to do anything. It is as of the time of writing yet to be confirmed but …

Black HatZero Day Initiative researchers have detailed the winning hacks of this year's Pwn2Own competition, painting a picture of broken browsers and owned systems. The quartet of Matt Molinyawe, Abdul-aziz Hariri, Jasiel Spelman, and Jason Smith of Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative vulnerability clearing house detailed and …

Pwn2OwnResearchers pulled off multiple OS X, Windows and web browser exploits at the latest Pwn2Own competition. White hat hackers earned $460,000 in prizes for finding and exploiting 21 security vulnerabilities in widely used software. Details of the flaws were privately shared with vendors so that their code that can be fixed and …

CanSecWestThere's US$75,000 up for grabs to hackers who compromise VMware's hypervisor software in an upgraded Pwn2Own contest next month. The next challenge represents a significant boost to the difficulty of the hacking competition in which popular hardware and software products are publicly flayed by cyber-security gurus. The …

PacSecModern Samsung devices including the S6, S6 Edge and Note 4 can have phone calls intercepted using malicious base stations, according to initial research findings from two researchers. Daniel Komaromy and Nico Golde demonstrated the attacks on Samsung's 'Shannon' line of baseband chips today at the Mobile Pwn2Own competition …

The Cold War has reached out a long-dead hand to stifle the Pwn2Own hackfest in Tokyo – with the international Wassenaar Arrangement blamed for the event's cancelation. Organized by the HP TippingPoint-backed Zero Day Initiative, Pwn2Own slings bounties to researchers who find and exploit security bugs in popular software and …

Security vulns in every one of the big four web browsers were exploited at the Pwn2Own hacking contest on Friday to remotely execute arbitrary code on Windows PCs. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer all fell to the skills of the competition entrants, some in less than a second. All the vulnerabilities exploited …

Day one of the 2015 Pwn2Own hacking contest in Vancouver, Canada, saw big wins for contestants and headaches for software makers: competing teams successfully exploited fresh vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and Reader, Microsoft's Windows and Internet Explorer, and Mozilla's Firefox, to hijack PCs. The competition, now in its …

Export regulations that threaten to hinder vulnerability research and exploit development have put hackers on edge ahead of the annual Pwn2Own contest. Operators of the hack-fest have reportedly issued an email warning to researchers to obtain legal advice about how the Wassenaar Arrangement, a 42-nation effort aimed at " …

Blood is flowing on the floor of the Pwn2Own challenge slaughterhouse, after whitehats hacked their way through an Apple iPhone 5S, Samsung Galaxy S5, LG Nexus 5 and Amazon Fire, most often by using Near Field Communications. The annual contest backed by HP, BlackBerry and Google, and run by HP's Zero Day Initiative …

Security outlet VUPEN has revealed it held onto a critical Internet Explorer vulnerability for three years before disclosing it at the March Pwn2Own hacker competition. The company wrote in a disclosure last week it discovered the vulnerability (CVE-2014-2777) on 12 February 2011 which was patched by Microsoft on 17 June (MS14 …

The Pwn2Own and Pwnium hacking contests at the annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver have earned security researchers over a million dollars in prizes, exposed 34 serious zero-day flaws in popular code, and earned over $82,000 for the Canadian Red Cross. In each of the Pwn2Own and Pwnium competitions, contestants are …

Pwn2OwnGoogle trowelled plaster over seven security cracks in Chrome on Tuesday, a day before the browser became one of the targets at the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition. The latest cross platform security update for Chrome fixed four "high" severity flaws and three lesser bugs. Three of the four high profile bugs were …