An iPhone 5S, Samsung Galaxy S5, LG Nexus 5, and Amazon Fire Phone were all hijacked by whitehats on the first day of an annual hacking contest that pays hefty cash prizes for exploits bypassing security sandbox perimeters.
Day one of the Mobile Pwn2Own competition at the PacSec conference in Tokyo repeated a theme struck over and over at previous Pwn2Own events. If a device runs software, it can be hacked—regardless of claims made by marketers or fans. Organized by the Hewlett-Packard-owned Zero Day Initiative and sponsored this year by Google and Blackberry, Mobile Pwn2Own awards as much as $150,000 for the most advanced hacks, with a total prize pool of $425,000. In exchange, contestants agree to turn over technical details to the organizer and keep them confidential until the underlying vulnerabilities have been patched.
During the first day, according to this HP blog post, the following hacks took place:
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