The Pwn2Own Ireland 2025 hacking competition has ended with security researchers collecting $1,024,750 in cash awards after exploiting 73 zero-day vulnerabilities.
At Pwn2Own Ireland 2025, competitors targeted products in eight categories, including printers, network storage systems, messaging apps, smart home devices, surveillance equipment, home networking equipment, flagship smartphones (Apple iPhone 16, Samsung Galaxy S25, and Google Pixel 9), and wearable technology (including Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses and Quest 3/3S headsets).
This year's contest also expanded the attack surface to include USB port exploitation on mobile handsets, requiring researchers to hack locked devices via a physical connection. However, traditional wireless protocols like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and NFC (near-field communication) remained valid attack vectors.
The hacking contest, co-sponsored by Meta alongside QNAP and Synology, took place from October 21 to October 23 in Cork, Ireland.
Summoning Team won this year's edition of Pwn2Own Ireland with 22 Master of Pwn points and $187,500 earned throughout the three-day event after hacking the Samsung Galaxy S25, the Synology DiskStation DS925+ NAS, the Home Assistant Green, the Synology ActiveProtect Appliance DP320 NAS drive, the Synology CC400W camera, and the QNAP TS-453E NAS device.
Team ANHTUD secured the second position with $76,750 and 11.5 Master of Pwn points, while Team Synactiv took third place with $90,000 in prizes and 11 Master of Pwn points.
On the first day of Pwn2Own Ireland, hackers exploited 34 unique zero-days and collected $522,500 in cash awards. On the second day of the event, they demoed another 22 unique zero-day vulnerabilities for $267.500.
The highlight of the last day was the Samsung Galaxy S25 getting hacked by Interrupt Labs' team via an improper input validation bug, who earned 5 Master of Pwn points and $50,000 after also enabling location tracking and the camera in the process.
While Team Z3 was also scheduled today to demonstrate a WhatsApp Zero-Click remote code execution zero-day, eligible for a $1 million reward, they withdrew from the competition. They chose to disclose their findings privately to ZDI analysts before sharing their research with Meta’s engineering team.
The Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) organizes this hacking contest to identify security vulnerabilities before threat actors can exploit them in attacks and coordinate responsible disclosure with the affected vendors.
After the zero-days are exploited at Pwn2Own, the vendors have 90 days to release patches before Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative publicly discloses them.
In January 2026, the ZDI will once again be at the Automotive World technology show in Tokyo, Japan, for the third Pwn2Own Automotive contest, again sponsored by Tesla
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Original Article Published at Bleeping Computer
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