Gone in 60 seconds: Chinese hackers shut down Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer ... but only for top hackathon
A Shanghai-based team won US$60,000 for a 30-second hack of Flash, and a further US$25,000 for managing to exploit a bug in Windows' font handling to bypass its defensive measures.
Members of two Chinese hacking teams have scooped the top prizes at a major annual hacking competition held in Vancouver, Canada, this week.
Hackers at Pwn2Own, launched in 2007 and sponsored by Google and HP, were successful in breaching the security of widely-used software including Adobe Flash, Mozilla's Firefox browser, Adobe PDF Reader and Microsoft's recently-discontinued Internet Explorer.
Flash, in particular, enables streaming media, advertising and multimedia content on millions of websites
The Shanghai-based Keen Team won US$60,000 for a 30-second hack of Flash, and a further US$25,000 for managing to exploit a bug in Windows' font handling to bypass its defensive measures and give themselves administrator privileges.
Keen Team's Lu Jihui, collaborating with Tencent PC Manager hacker Jun Mao, also scooped US$55,000 for a series of exploits of Adobe Reader.
The two hackers took less than 60 seconds to bypass PDF security protections.