White hat hackers in China hack Chrome, Edge and Safari for Tianfu Cup

Chinese hackers are some of the best in the world, and several of them recently participated in a network security contest titled the Tianfu Cup. The event is China’s version of the Pwn2Own, a popular computer hacking contest. The Tianfu Cup is considered as China’s most elite competitive cybersecurity event. The organisers of the cup included, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Qihoo 360 and other Chinese tech companies.

Over the weekend, a number of participating teams hacked into some of the world’s most popular web browsers, Wi-Fi routers and other software. The hackers tested vulnerabilities hidden in several popular apps, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Apple's Safari. Participants also found vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe PDF Reader.

The event concluded with the team 360Vulcan emerging as the leader. The team won a total bounty of $382,500 (Approx. Rs. 2,74,80,000) by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Edge, Adobe PDF Reader, MS Office 365, qemu+Ubuntu, and VMWare Workstation.

ZDNet reported that a spokesperson for the Tianfu Cup shared all the security flaws discovered with the respective vendors.

@ SZ now.

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I've reported all bugs (used on TFC and some hard-to-exploit bugs too) to Google, now they are working for the patch. :) It's my first time to take a p2o-like event. It's an impressive experience. — Wenxiang Qian (@leonwxqian) November 17, 2019

Hacking competitions like this are not uncommon and play a vital role in improving cybersecurity by helping tech companies identify loopholes in their software and provide security patches before malicious hackers discover them. Between 2014 and 2018, teams Tencent and Qihoo 360 helped Tesla by reporting vulnerabilities. Chinese security researches have a longstanding history of assisting American companies to discover security flaws in their systems.