Pwn2Own – Windows 11, Microsoft Teams Hacked & Exploiting 16 Zero-day Bugs

The contestants who successfully exploited 16 zero-day bugs within 16 different products in the Pwn2Own Vancouver 2022 first day won more than $800,000 in prize money.

The product line includes:-

• Microsoft Windows 11 (OS)
• Microsoft Teams (communication platform)

First Day: Microsoft Teams and Windows 11 Hacked

In the enterprise communications category, Microsoft Teams was the first victim of an improper configuration flaw exploited by Hector Peralta.

The members of the Star Labs team, Billy Jheng Bing-Jhong, Muhammad Alifa Ramdhan, and Nguyễn Hoàng Thạch exhibited a zero-click exploit chain that contains 2 bugs, and here they are mentioned below:-

• Injection
• Arbitrary file write

This is the third time that Microsoft Teams was compromised by Masato Kinugawa, and this time he exploited three bugs of injection, misconfiguration, and sandbox escape in order to hack the system.

In the successful demonstration of their Microsoft Teams zero-day vulnerabilities, the three hackers received a share of $150,000 and 15 Master of Pwn points. 

Additionally, STAR Labs was able to earn an extra $40,000. This was earned by using a Use-After-Free vulnerability to escalate privileges on a Windows 11 operating system.

By gaining access to Oracle Virtualbox’s privilege escalation system, the organization again added an additional $40,000 reward.

To hack the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Manfred Paul (@_manfp) demonstrated the exploitation of the 2 bugs successfully, and here they are:- 

• Prototype pollution
• Improper input validation

By exploiting the above two bugs in the Mozilla Firefox web browser, he earned $100,000 and 10 Master of Pwn points.

Apart from the Mozilla Firefox browser, Manfred Paul also successfully demonstrated the exploitation of a bug in Apple Safari, and by compromising the Apple Safari web browser, he earned a hefty reward of $150,000.

Here below, we have mentioned the bug that is exploited in Apple Safari:-

• Out-of-band write flaw

During a test run of Microsoft Windows 11 on a workstation, Marcin Wiązowski exploited an out-of-bounds write privilege escalation vulnerability. 

This earned him a tidy sum of $40,000 and 4 Points of Master of Pwns for his efforts, along with a high rating from the Microsoft team for writing the accompanying whitepaper.

Two bugs have been exploited on the Ubuntu desktop by Sea Security’s team of Orca. Here below, we have mentioned those two bugs that are exploited and earned the team $40,000 along with 4 Master of Pwn points:-

• An Out-of-Bounds Write (OOBW)
• Use-After-Free (UAF)

The first day of the contest is over, which means the next updates will be up soon, and we will keep you updated with all the upcoming events of the contest.

You can follow us on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity and hacking news updates.