Security Vulnerability Allow Cracker Pwn2Own

As the kids nowadays say, there was some "epic fail" going on with the coders for the latest Java, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash), Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 10 thanks to how easily hackers in the hacking contest by CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada... the contest dubbed "Pwn2Own"... breached their security.

Even in 2013, the security of popular programs continues to get "pwned" by the savviest of savvy hackers out there.

What's more, these Pwn2Own entrants were even able to acquire the $500,000 jackpot after making short work of these ubiquitous propriety programs, like it is 1999 again and companies hadn't had more than a decade's worth of experience in handling IT security.

Security budget, new programs tend to have the most security holes around, even in today's presumably more enlightened world when it comes to popular consumer software.

After all, these programs are usually coded from scratch, and even if they're able to pass through beta testing, there should still be some bugs and kinks around left to fix that the beta testers, coders, and programmers have overlooked.

All the same, it's still alarming how easily these Pwn2Own crackers were able to waltz off with that amount of money, as though they had robbed a bank or struck oil.

 

The 2013 CanSecWest Vancouver security conference had not one but two hacking contests.

There's first the aforementioned  Pwn2Own one against Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Java, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 10.

Afterwards, even Google got into the fray with its own Pwnium contest wherein hackers were tasked to crack and unleash their special kind of digital mayhem on the Chrome OS.

Pwn2Own 2013 is sponsored by HP according the DVLabs Team head, Brian Gorenc.

As for the cash prize, it's $480,000 as well as subscriptions and laptop prizes that brings the total amount of possible prizes totaling more than half a million dollars.

 

Hackers are being encouraged by companies in order to hack their systems for the sake of testing security, which doesn't have a real-world equivalent.

In the digital realm and the information technology field, that's the value that hackers... or at least white hat ones that report vulnerabilities to security firms instead of exploit them... bring to the table at present. Security crackers easily defeated Java, Chrome, Firefox, and IE 10 on Wednesday (March 6), then finished off the rest...

Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, and IE 10 on Surface Pro... on Thursday (March 7).