Bounty hunters win over Rs 3.5 crores by hacking into Google Pixel, others

Although hackers didn't reveal the exact vulnerability, Google claims that it has already fixed it and released the patch as well.

At the PwnFest hacking competition in Seoul, South Korea, a bunch of white-hat (Read-Good hackers) hackers from China managed to hack Google's Pixel in less than a minute. During the competition, the hackers from 'Qihoo 360', ran a remote code execution in the Pixel phone via zero-day vulnerability and displayed the 'Pwned by 360 Alpha Team' on the Chrome Browser. In other words, by gaining the remote access, the hackers managed to exploit phone contacts, messages, emails, photos, videos and even card details.

Though they didn't reveal the exact vulnerability, but Google claims that it has already patched the vulnerability and released it in the next stable build.

Nevertheless, 'Qihoo 360' bagged the price money of $120,000 (approx. Rs 84 lakh) just by hacking into the new smartphone from Google. Not only this, the team also managed to hack into Adobe Flash in just 4 seconds which earned them another cash price of $120,000. But Qihoo 360 didn't stop here and further revealed vulnerabilities in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 as well. In short, the total price money they managed to grab was totaled up to $520,000 (approx. Rs 351 lakh)

Apple's Safari browser was also not spared and one of the teams managed to gain root privilege via zero-day vulnerability.

Just so you know, Google Pixel currently sells in India at Rs 57,000 for 32 GB variant while the Pixel XL starts at Rs 67,000 (32 GB variant). Given Pixel is Google's attempt to premium devices, getting hacked in less than 60 seconds is not what Google would have expected. Our review of the Pixel and Pixel XL is on its way so stay tuned on this portal for further updates.