Somebody won $225,000 for hacking web browsers for Google

There’s been Google-sponsored contest going down in Vancouver over the past couple of days where security researchers have gathered to win thousands of dollars in prize money for publicly exploiting bugs in popular browsers and other common software such as Adobe Flash. Known as Pwn2Own, this year’s contest has seen a record-breaking reward when a researcher named JungHoon Lee won $225,000 for finding three bugs in the most popular web browsers. 

For the past two days, security researchers have descended on Vancouver for a Google-sponsored contest called Pwn2Own, which offers top-dollar prizes for anyone who can publicly exploit bugs in popular browsers and other widely used software like Adobe Flash. This year was a particularly lucrative one, as a researcher named JungHoon Lee (also known as lokihardt) came away from the contest with a record $225,000 for three bugs, affecting Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. The Chrome bug was the most lucrative, earning $110,000 in total, bringing in extra money because it involved a beta version of Chrome and because Lee was able to exploit the bug into system access. The Chrome bug was revealed in a single two-minute presentation which, as one observer pointed out, put Lee’s earnings at $916 per second.