$10,000 cash prize for smartphone hacks

A hacking contest scheduled to kick off March 18 at the CanSecWest security conference will award cash prizes of $10,000 to anyone who is able to break into popular smartphones such as Apple's iPhone or the RIM BlackBerry. This is a shift in focus from the last few years' challenges, which have focused on mainstream operating systems such as Apple's Mac OS X or Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Echoing the increasing importance of the mobile landscape, Terri Forslof of the contest sponsor, TippingPoint told ComputerWorld, "Mobile is a new frontier of sorts. We've seen mobile exploits in the past, but we still don't see a lot of focus in that area. More and more, people are taking computing on the go and rely on these devices for email and accessing the web."

Another change initiated this time round will be that the organization has not capped the number of bugs it will buy from hackers who are able to break into these smartphones. This is in contrast to previous years where there were only one to five prizes that were offered.

Details of the Pwn2Own bugs will not be publicly revealed, but will instead be reported to the respective vendors as well as using them in its own security technology to block the discovered attack vectors.

To read more:
- check out this article from ComputerWorld

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