During the second day of Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, competitors collected $385,750 in cash awards after exploiting 15 unique zero-day vulnerabilities in multiple products, including Windows 11, Microsoft Exchange, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations.
The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking competition takes place at the OffensiveCon conference from May 14 to May 16 and focuses on enterprise technologies and artificial intelligence.
Security researchers can earn over $1,000,000 in cash and prizes by hacking fully patched products in the web browser, enterprise applications, cloud-native/container environments, virtualization, local privilege escalation, servers, local inference, and LLM categories.
According to Pwn2Own's rules, all targeted devices run the latest operating system versions, and all entries must compromise the target and demonstrate arbitrary code execution. Vendors have 90 days to patch their software and hardware after the zero-days are disclosed at Pwn2Own.
The highlight of the second day was Cheng-Da Tsai (also known as Orange Tsai) of DEVCORE Research Team earning $200,000 after chaining three bugs to gain remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on Microsoft Exchange.
Siyeon Wi also collected $7,500 after exploiting an integer overflow bug to hack Windows 11, and Ben Koo of Team DDOS escalated privileges to root on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations to earn a $10,000 cash prize, while 0xDACA and Noam Trobishi used a use-after-free bug to exploit the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.
In the AI category, Le Duc Anh Vu of Viettel Cyber Security hacked the Cursor AI coding agent for $30,000, Sina Kheirkhah of Summoning Team demoed an OpenAI Codex zero-day ($20,000), and Compass Security exploited Cursor ($15,000).
Pwn2Own leaderboard (ZDI)On the first day, Orange Tsai earned another $175,000 after chaining 4 logic bugs for a Microsoft Edge sandbox escape, while Valentina Palmiotti (chompie) of IBM X-Force Offensive Research collected $20,000 for rooting Red Hat Linux for Workstations and $50,000 for an NVIDIA Container Toolkit zero-day.
Windows 11 was also hacked three times on day one by Angelboy and TwinkleStar03 (working with the DEVCORE Internship Program), Kentaro Kawane of GMO Cybersecurity, and Marcin Wiązowski, each earning $30,000 in cash rewards for demonstrating new privilege-escalation zero-days.
On the third day of Pwn2Own, the hackers will target Microsoft Windows 11, VMware ESXi, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft SharePoint, and several AI coding agents.
The full schedule for the second day and the results for each challenge are available here, while the complete schedule for Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 is available here.
During last year's Pwn2Own Berlin contest, TrendMicro's Zero Day Initiative awarded 1,078,750 for 29 zero-day flaws and some bug collisions.
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