Associates of two Chinese cyber crime teams have hollowed out the best prizes at a main yearly hacking competition held in Vancouver, Canada.
Cyber attackers at Pwn2Own, commenced in 2007, were triumphant in violating the security of broadly -used software including Adobe Flash, Mozilla’s Firefox browser, Adobe PDF Reader and Microsoft’s freshly – discontinued Internet Explorer.
Flash, specifically, enables streaming media, advertising and multimedia content on thousands of sites.
The Shanghai Keen group won US$60,000 for a thirty second hack of Flash, and an additional US$25,000 for exploiting a bug in Windows’ font handling to find a way around its self-protective measures and give themselves supervisor privileges.
Keen Team’s Lu Jihui, teaming up with Tencent PC Manager cyber attacker Jun Mao, also hollowed out US$55,000 for a sequence of exploits of Adobe Reader.
The two cyber attackers took less than 60 seconds to evade PDF safety protections.
Members of another Chinese cyber squadron, 360Vulcan, were also triumphant in breaching the safety of Internet Explorer, the widely – used web browser.
Microsoft publicized this week that it was stopping its much – used but much criticized Internet Explorer after 20 years as it shifts to its fresh Spartan browser.
This year marked Keen Team’s third successive competition. In the past, the team has fruitfully evaded the security on Apple’s Safari browser and iPhone working system, as well as frequently hacking Adobe Flash in spite of enhancements in security.
Last year, the team bequeathed a portion of their winnings at Pwn2Own to charities in lieu of the families of the victims of Malaysian Airlines flight 370.
With an average age of 34, quite a lot of members of the team are fresh graduates of Shanghai’s esteemed Fudan and Jiatong Universities, while others worked as information safety researchers at Microsoft prior to joining Keen Cloud Tech.
In spite of the almost lightning speed of the cyber attacks, Yiping Lv, COO of Keen Cloud Tech, which funds the hacking team, said it reproduced years of training and performance.
Lv said in a statement that the breakthrough and development of a susceptibility is not as easy as one imagines.
While Keen Team devotes themselves to make the most of faults in the system in order to perk up computer protection, other Chinese hackers are not so philanthropic.
Former US National Security Agency manager Mike McConnell said this week that cyber attackers working for the Chinese regime have broken into the computers at every main American corporation.
He said that the Chinese have broken through every main business of any importance in the United States and taken information.
While in the earlier period, Beijing has stoutly denied any link to hacking, the latest edition of The Science of Military Strategy, put out by the top research institution of the People’s Liberation Army in 2013 but only made extensively obtainable this month, admits that there are digital weapons teams “on both the military and civilian – administration sides”.
