A team of Chinese hackers were able to hack into Google’s latest flagship device Pixel and it took them less 60 seconds.
The incident took place at PwnFest, a hacking competition in Seoul, South Korea. A team of white-hat hackers, known as Qihoo 360, demonstrated an exploit that allowed for remote code execution on the Pixel. Using a zero-day vulnerability, the hackers remotely installed the code on Google’s sought-after device in just less then a minute.
Google’s Pixel smartphones leaked hours before event
The team launched Google Play Store and then Google’s mobile version of Chrome on the device using the exploit before displaying a messaged that read “Pwned by 360 Alpha Team”.
Qihoo 360 won a cash prize of $120,000 for the hack. It seems Google need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to patch the vulnerability.
Besides hacking Pixel, the team also demonstrated vulnerabilities in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 and a decade-old exploit that inexplicably still works on Adobe Flash. For all their day’s hard work, Qihoo 360 was awarded $520,000 in cash prizes.
