Hackers Win $260,000 on First Day of Pwn2Own Berlin 2025

Pwn2Own participants have earned tens of thousands of dollars for Red Hat, Windows, Oracle VirtualBox, Docker Desktop, and AI exploits.

The Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 hacking competition organized by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) is taking place these days in Berlin, Germany, and on the first day participants earned a total of $260,000.

Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 introduces AI hacking and the first ever winner in this category is Sina Kheirkhah of Summoning Team, who earned $20,000 for an exploit targeting the Chroma open source AI application database.

The same researcher earned an additional $15,000 for a different exploit in the same category. He successfully hacked an NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, but it has been marked as a ‘collision’ because the vendor had known about the bug but had yet to patch it.

Viettel Cyber Security earned the same amount for another known NVIDIA Triton vulnerability that ...