Researchers Earn $1.3 Million for 47 Zero-Days at Pwn2Own Berlin 2026
Security researchers collected $1,298,250 for exploiting 47 zero-day vulnerabilities across enterprise and AI products at Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, with DEVCORE winning the contest.
The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking contest concluded on May 16, with security researchers earning $1,298,250 in rewards for exploiting 47 zero-day vulnerabilities. The three-day competition, held at the OffensiveCon conference from May 14 to May 16, focused on enterprise technologies and artificial intelligence, targeting fully patched products across web browsers, enterprise applications, local privilege escalation, servers, cloud-native environments, virtualization, and LLM categories.
DEVCORE won this year's edition with 50.5 Master of Pwn points and $505,000 in rewards after hacking Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 11. STARLabs SG finished second with $242,500 (25 points), and Out Of Bounds took third with $95,750 (12.75 points). The competition's highest single reward was $200,000, awarded to Cheng-Da Tsai (Orange Tsai) of DEVCORE for chaining three bugs to achieve remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on Microsoft Exchange.
On the first day, competitors collected $523,000 for 24 unique zero-days. Orange Tsai earned an additional $175,000 for a Microsoft Edge sandbox escape chaining four logic bugs. Windows 11 was hacked three times, and Valentina Palmiotti (chompie) of IBM X-Force Offensive Research collected $70,000 for rooting Red Hat Linux for Workstations and exploiting an NVIDIA Container Toolkit zero-day.
The second day saw $385,750 awarded for 15 zero-days, including another Windows 11 local privilege escalation vulnerability, a root-privilege escalation bug in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations, and zero-days in multiple AI coding agents. On the final day, competitors earned $389,500 for eight more zero-days, hacking Windows 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations again, and using a memory corruption bug to exploit VMware ESXi.
After Pwn2Own ends, vendors have 90 days to release security patches before Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) publicly discloses the flaws. This year's contest saw a significant increase in both the number of zero-days and total payout compared to last year's Pwn2Own Berlin, where ZDI awarded $1,078,750 for 29 zero-days and some bug collisions.
The inclusion of AI coding agents and LLM categories reflects the growing importance of AI security in the enterprise landscape. As organizations increasingly adopt AI-powered tools, the vulnerabilities discovered at Pwn2Own highlight the need for robust security testing of these emerging technologies. The contest also demonstrated the continued relevance of traditional enterprise software vulnerabilities, with Microsoft Exchange and Windows 11 remaining prime targets for researchers.
The Infosecurity Magazine report adds new details on the specific exploits that earned top prizes at the event. Nguyen Hoang Thach of STARLabs SG earned $200,000 for a VMware ESXi memory corruption bug with cross-tenant code execution, while Devcore's Orange Tsai chained four logic bugs to achieve a sandbox escape on Microsoft Edge, earning $175,000. The article also highlights the competition's AI focus, noting that for the first time coding agents Cursor, Claude Code and OpenAI Codex were targeted, alongside AI databases such as Chroma and Oracle Autonomous AI Database.