Viettel experts win at world’s leading cyber-attack contest

IT experts at Viettel Cyber Security. Photo courtesy of Viettel

HÀ NỘI — Two IT experts from Viettel Cyber Security, a member of Viettel Group, won the Pwn2Own Vancouver for 2022 held in Vancouver, Canada, the world’s leading contest in cyber-attacks.

Viettel was the only representative from Việt Nam participating in the contest and has won the award for three consecutive years.

The experts named Đào Trọng Nghĩa and Trần Hữu Phúc Vinh were able to successfully show an escalation of privilege via Integer Overflow on Microsoft Windows 11. The contest featured more than 20 IT experts around the world from leading technology firms such as STAR Labs and Sea Security.

Earlier, IT experts from Viettel also won at Pwn2Own Tokyo 2020 and Pwn2Own Vancouver 2021.

Viettel Cyber Security now has over 400 high quality IT experts, including 30 people recognised at international network security ranking and prestigious organisations such as Microsoft, Bugcrowd and Google.

The annual Pwn2Own is the world’s largest and most prestigious cyber-attack competition, sponsored by security firm TrendMicro and held by the Zero Day Initiative since 2007. Famous technology companies bring their products as targets for hackers to show their skills to attack and exploit the software or equipment, through which manufacturers can immediately correct errors and improve security.

Pwn2Own 2022 focused on finding vulnerabilities on major operating system platforms including Windows 11, Microsoft Teams, Ubuntu Desktop, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Oracle VirtualBox and Tesla. Pwn2Own Vancouver 2022 ended with up to 17 successful exploits and awarded US$1.15 million to white-hat hackers and security researchers. — VNS