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 had yet to be patched by the tech giant.
The highest single reward was earned on the first day by the Star Labs team, which received $60,000 for an exploit chain that involved a Linux kernel vulnerability to perform a Docker Desktop escape and ultimately execute code on the underlying operating system.
Team Prison Break got $40,000 for escaping Oracle VirtualBox and executing code on the underlying OS.
Others earned between $15,000 and $30,000 for Red Hat and Windows 11 exploits.
Over the next two days, Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 participants will attempt to demonstrate hacks against NVIDIA Triton Inference Server and Container Toolkit, Microsoft SharePoint, VMware ESXi and Workstation, Firefox, Redis, VirtualBox, Red Hat, and Windows 11.
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