Samsung’s newest flagship phone fell to hackers six separate times in just the first two days of the contest, and the researchers who did it walked away with cash each time. At Pwn2Own Ireland 2026, the live hacking contest run by TrendAI Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) in October 2026, security teams exploited the Galaxy S26 on October 6 and October 7, according to ZDI’s own published results, and a further compromise followed on October 8. By the time the event wrapped, the final tally had reached $1,262,000 in prizes for 98 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities, according to figures reported by TrendAI.
The contest is not a stunt. Every bug demonstrated on stage gets reported to the affected vendor under ZDI’s responsible disclosure process, which gives companies a fixed window to ship a patch before technical details go public. That means Samsung, Google, Oracle, Philips, Sonos, Lexmark, Canon, Garmin, OpenAI, and the team behind Home Assistant are all now racing against a disclosure clock, armed with proof-of-concept code for flaws that, in the wrong hands, could have been sold to criminal groups or state-backed operators instead of handed to ZDI for a check.
Don't miss new tech stories on Google
Add Tech Insider once in the Google app and our stories appear in your news suggestions.
What Happened at Pwn2Own Ireland 2026
ZDI announced the event’s seven categories in July 2026, and Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 then opened on October 6 with 21 scheduled attempts against consumer and enterprise devices, spanning categories including Mobile Phone, Smart Home, AI Infrastructure, Coding Agents, Printers, and Wellness wearables, with 29 research teams registered across the full event according to BleepingComputer’s tally. By the end of the day, ZDI had awarded $388,500 for 32 unique zero-day vulnerabilities, a figure the organization confirmed directly in its own Day Two recap post. Day Two expanded the target list to 24 scheduled attempts with roughly $780,000 theoretically on offer, and confirmed results pushed the running total well past half a million dollars before the midpoint of the contest.
Unlike a traditional bug bounty program where researchers submit findings whenever they find them, Pwn2Own runs on a live clock. Each team gets a fixed time slot, typically 15 to 30 minutes depending on the category, to demonstrate a working exploit chain against a specific device running the latest firmware. A successful demo earns the full prize; a partial success involving a previously known bug (“collision”) earns a reduced payout; a miss earns nothing. That structure is why this year’s numbers include so many “SUCCESS / COLLISION” results, where a team’s exploit chain worked but included one or more bugs ZDI had already seen from another entrant or the vendor itself.
Samsung Galaxy S26 Falls Six Times in Two Days
The Galaxy S26 was the most closely watched target of the week, and it did not disappoint anyone except Samsung. On Day One, three separate teams successfully compromised the device: Nguyen Thanh Dat of Viettel Cyber Security used a four-bug chain (three already known to Samsung) for $31,250 and 3.25 Master of Pwn points; Interrupt Labs used four bugs, including three collisions and one new zero-day, for $15,750; and Ikotas Labs chained four bugs, three of them new, for $11,000.
Day Two brought three more successful attempts against the same phone. Dimitrios Valsamaras and Ken Gannon, working with Tenia Valsamara from CENSUS Labs and using a tool called Djini.ai from Mobile Hacking Lab, broke in with a single Confused Deputy bug (CWE-441) and won the round outright, since only the first successful demo against a given target claims the top prize. Kyeongmin Kim of KAIST Hacking Lab followed with a remote compromise using one unique bug and two collisions for $8,500, and PetoWorks closed out the device’s bad week with a three-bug collision chain worth $6,250. The official Day Three post reportedly records one more successful remote Galaxy S26 compromise on October 8, a two-bug chain with one collision and one unique bug from BunkyoWesterns worth $8,250, so the six hits of the first two days were not the phone’s last.
How Attackers Cracked Samsung’s Flagship
ZDI’s public result feed does not disclose full exploit chains during the contest, a standard practice that protects Samsung while the 90-day coordinated disclosure window runs. What the public record does show is the bug class behind the day-two win that claimed the round: a Confused Deputy vulnerability, a flaw in which a privileged component performs an action on behalf of a less-privileged one without properly checking whether that action was authorized. It is a well-documented vulnerability class, but demonstrating it reliably against a shipping flagship phone’s latest firmware under contest time pressure is a different matter entirely. The repeated collisions, where multiple independent teams found overlapping bugs, also suggest the Galaxy S26’s attack surface has specific weak points that more than one research group converged on independently.
Day One vs Day Two: A Closer Look
ZDI listed the Galaxy S26, Pixel 10 and iPhone 17 as mobile targets in July 2026, and Google’s Pixel 10 also made its Pwn2Own debut this year in the Mobile Phone category, and the team of Mikhail Evdokimov, Polina Smirnova, and Mate Zombor of White Noise Club ran out of time on Day One and failed to land a working exploit. The device did not stay safe for long, though: Ikotas Labs later broke through for a $300,000 payout, part of $562,500 in combined rewards the Pixel 10 generated across the full contest, according to ZDI. That trajectory matters for comparison purposes: it shows the Galaxy S26’s early losses were not simply a reflection of every phone being equally exposed, but once researchers had more time, Google’s flagship proved just as penetrable as Samsung’s.
What the Galaxy S26 Results and Price Moves Mean for Owners
Researchers successfully compromised the Galaxy S26 six times over two competition days while using the current, fully patched software required by the contest rules. For owners, that means the weak points were found in an up-to-date phone rather than in an outdated build, so keeping automatic updates on matters, and the fixes for the reported bugs are what to watch for from Samsung.
One caution applies to the prize figures. The event schedule’s listed $50,000 target value for some Galaxy S26 attempts was a scheduled maximum or category amount, not proof of the final amount paid to each successful team. The preliminary schedule and daily prize figures are also not the final overall award total, because a later Trend Micro release reports more than $1.2 million overall.
The phone’s price moved at nearly the same time as its security headlines. Listed prices show the Galaxy S26 (256GB) moving from $899 to $999, the Galaxy S26 (512GB) from $1,099 to $1,199, and the Galaxy S26+ (256GB) from $1,099 to $1,199. The Galaxy S26 Ultra (256GB) moves from $1,299 to $1,399. The results indicate the increase took effect around October 1â2, 2026, and reports attributed it to higher memory-chip costs associated with AI-related demand. Shoppers should treat these as reported list prices, not guaranteed checkout prices after promotions or trade-ins.
Inside the Record Haul: Zero-Days, Collisions, and Payouts
Day Two’s confirmed, publicly itemized payouts totaled at least $220,000 across targets including Home Assistant Green, the Sonos Era 300 speaker, Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database, Chroma, Nvidia’s Dynamo, the Lexmark CX532adwe and Canon imageFORCE 1643F printers, and the Garmin Index BPM smart scale, plus the undisclosed-amount Galaxy S26 win described above. Combined with Day One’s confirmed $388,500, the two-day running total stood at a minimum of $608,500 before Day Three and Day Four pushed the contest to its close. By the final count, ZDI and TrendAI confirmed the full four-day event had paid out $1,262,000 across 98 unique zero-day vulnerabilities, more than double the running total at the Day Two midpoint.
Home Assistant Green emerged as the single most-targeted device of Day Two, with five separate research teams scheduled to attempt it. Four of those attempts succeeded: Yves Bieri of Xint won $30,000 for a clean takedown worth 3 Master of Pwn points, the Doyensec duo of Yassine Bengana and Maxence Schmitt earned $7,500 on a three-bug collision, PetoWorks collected $12,000 on a five-bug chain with three unique flaws, and the McCaulay Hudson entry walked away with $7,000 for a six-bug chain containing five zero-days. Only GMO Flatt Security’s Shio Kudo came up empty against the device.
AI Infrastructure Becomes a New Pwn2Own Battleground
The most significant structural change in Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 is not a device, it is a category: AI Infrastructure. For the first time, ZDI put live AI deployment stacks on stage alongside routers and printers, and researchers wasted no time proving the category belongs there. On Day One, Taisic Yun of Xint used an improper input validation bug combined with code injection to land a reverse shell on LiteLLM, a popular open-source LLM gateway, earning $40,000. Ikotas Labs used a single argument-injection flaw to compromise OpenAI Codex for another $40,000, and VinSOC’s Nam Nguyen, Thanh Vu, and Tin Huynh chained five bugs into a working exploit against Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database for a third $40,000 payout.
Day Two kept the pressure on. HaeJung Yang of Out of Bounds earned $40,000 for an exploit against Nvidia’s Dynamo inference framework. Taisic Yun returned to breach Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database again, this time for $14,000 across three collisions and two new zero-days. Team MAMMOTH, a seven-person South Korean group, chained bugs against the Chroma vector database for $12,000, while Alessandro Fanio Gonzalez picked up $4,500 on a separate Chroma disclosure. The pattern across both days is consistent: the tools enterprises are rushing to deploy for retrieval-augmented generation, agent orchestration, and managed AI databases are exposing the same classes of injection and validation bugs that have plagued web applications for two decades, just with a new interface.
Smart Home Devices Take the Heaviest Beating
Outside of phones and AI platforms, Smart Home was the category with the most blood in the water. Philips Hue Bridge Pro, the hub that controls Philips’ connected lighting line, fell four times on Day One alone. VinSOC’s VÅĐ Chà Thà nh and Huáŧģnh ÄáŧĐc Tin opened with a seven-bug chain worth $40,000, the single largest non-AI, non-phone payout of the day. Out of Bounds followed with a five-bug collision chain for $12,000, and Xint’s Joohyun Park closed the device out with a five-bug chain for $6,000 in the day’s third and final round against that target.
The Sonos Era 300 speaker also drew repeat attention: McCaulay Hudson opened Day One with a $50,000 win combining an out-of-bounds write and a format string bug, the largest single payout of the opening day, and VinSOC collected $17,500 on a two-bug collision chain the same day. On Day Two, the Era 300 fell twice more, to Jack Dates of RET2 Systems ($9,500) and to Sina Kheirkhah of Summoning Team ($12,500), plus a third hit from Nguyen Thanh Dat and dungnm of Viettel Cyber Security ($10,500).
Printers, Wearables, and the Usual Suspects
Printers remain one of Pwn2Own’s most reliable punching bags, and 2026 was no exception. The Lexmark CX532adwe fell at least four times across the two days, to Thanh Do of Team Confused ($20,000 on Day One via a single use-after-free), Sina Kheirkhah of Summoning Team ($10,000), and on Day Two to Interrupt Labs ($5,000), Rick de Jager and Filippo Cremonese of Zellic and V12 Security ($5,000), and BoredPentester ($4,250). Not every printer gave up easily: Ikotas Labs failed against the Brother MFC-L8970CDW on Day One after running out of time, and Team T-X Lab’s four-person squad hit the same wall against the Lexmark on the same day. Brother’s printer failed again on Day Two, when Thanh Do of Team Confused could not complete a working chain against the MFC-L8970CDW in a second attempt.
In the Wellness category, the Garmin Index BPM smart scale became the first device in that category to fall cleanly, with Interrupt Labs landing an out-of-bounds read and write combination for $20,000 on Day One. McCaulay Hudson, having already banked $50,000 for the Sonos win, returned on Day Two to hit the Garmin device again for $6,750. Aaron Christophel of Summoning Team tried and failed against the same scale on Day One, a reminder that even well-resourced, named teams do not win every round they enter.
Who’s Winning Big: Top Teams and Researchers
By the time the contest closed on October 9, a verified final leaderboard put Ikotas Labs on top, with $361,000 in total winnings and 42.5 Master of Pwn points, according to ZDI’s closing tally, a result driven in large part by the team’s $300,000 Pixel 10 compromise. Through the first two days, VinSOC, the Vietnamese team behind the Philips Hue Bridge Pro and Oracle Autonomous AI Database wins, had banked $97,500 across just three Day One entries, while Interrupt Labs and Xint each landed multiple wins across both days and multiple categories, spreading their research across mobile, AI infrastructure, and smart home targets rather than specializing in one device class. Summoning Team, which won the Master of Pwn title outright at Pwn2Own Ireland 2025, stayed on the board with wins against both the Lexmark printer and the Sonos speaker, but could not catch Ikotas Labs’ late surge.
Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 vs 2025: A Year-Over-Year Comparison
Measured strictly by Day One output, Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 started behind last year’s pace, even though the full contest later closed at $1,262,000 for 98 zero-days. At Pwn2Own Ireland 2025, held October 21 to 23, ZDI awarded $522,500 for 34 unique zero-day bugs on the opening day alone, compared to $388,500 for 32 bugs this year. By the end of Day Two in 2025, the cumulative total had reached $792,750 across 56 unique bugs. The 2025 contest also carried a headline-grabbing top prize: ZDI advertised a potential $2,000,000 total pool that year, anchored by a $1,000,000 bounty for a zero-click WhatsApp exploit, the largest single prize ZDI had ever offered at a Pwn2Own event.
There is a plausible explanation for the slower start in 2026 that has nothing to do with researchers losing their edge: this year’s contest introduced an entirely new AI Infrastructure category, splitting researcher attention and submission effort across LiteLLM, Chroma, Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database, OpenAI Codex, and Nvidia Dynamo, targets that did not exist in the 2025 lineup at all. Several of those AI entries landed the maximum $40,000 award on their first attempt, suggesting the category is lucrative but also time-consuming to prepare for, which may be pulling research hours away from the mobile and smart-home categories that drove 2025’s faster pace.
Day One vs Day Two Payouts by Category
| Category | Day One Confirmed Payouts | Day Two Confirmed Payouts | Notable Targets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile Phone | $58,000 (Galaxy S26 x3) | $14,750+ (Galaxy S26 x3, one amount undisclosed) | Samsung Galaxy S26, Google Pixel 10 (failed attempt) |
| AI Infrastructure | $135,000 | $80,500 | LiteLLM, OpenAI Codex, Oracle AI Database, Nvidia Dynamo, Chroma |
| Smart Home | $58,000 (Philips Hue) | $61,250 (Home Assistant Green) | Philips Hue Bridge Pro, Home Assistant Green |
| Networked/Streaming | $67,500 (Sonos) | $32,500 (Sonos) | Sonos Era 300 |
| Printers | $30,000 | $24,250 | Lexmark CX532adwe, Canon imageFORCE 1643F, Brother MFC-L8970CDW |
| Wellness | $20,000 | $6,750 | Garmin Index BPM |
Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 vs Pwn2Own Ireland 2025
| Metric | Pwn2Own Ireland 2025 | Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Contest dates | October 21-23, 2025 | October 6-9, 2026 |
| Day One payout | $522,500 | $388,500 |
| Day One unique zero-days | 34 | 32 |
| Cumulative payout after Day Two | $792,750 | Not listed (the event’s final total was over $1.2 million) |
| Cumulative zero-days after Day Two | 56 | Not yet published |
| Advertised top prize | $1,000,000 (zero-click WhatsApp) | No single prize disclosed at this size |
| Master of Pwn winner | Summoning Team | Pending (announced after Day Four) |
| New categories | N/A | AI Infrastructure (LiteLLM, Chroma, Oracle AI DB, OpenAI Codex, Nvidia Dynamo) |
The 90-Day Disclosure Clock Starts Now
Every successful exploit demonstrated at Pwn2Own triggers the same process behind the scenes. ZDI takes possession of the technical details, verifies the researcher’s findings, and privately notifies the affected vendor under a standard coordinated-disclosure timeline, giving the company a window measured in months, not days, to investigate root causes and ship a fix before ZDI publishes an advisory. That is the mechanism that separates a contest like Pwn2Own from a criminal zero-day sale: the researcher gets paid up front, in public, and the vendor gets time to respond before any attacker outside the room learns the details. It is the same disclosure logic that played out after Citrix’s own third NetScaler zero-day this year, where a delayed patch window gave attackers a head start once exploitation details leaked. For device owners, the practical takeaway is to keep automatic updates enabled on phones, smart speakers, and smart-home hubs through the first quarter of 2027, since that is the window in which Samsung, Sonos, Philips, Lexmark, Canon, Garmin, and the maintainers of Home Assistant, LiteLLM, Chroma, and related AI tooling are most likely to ship the fixes stemming from this week’s results.
Why This Matters Beyond the Prize Money
It is tempting to read Pwn2Own as a spectator sport, but the real value is in what it reveals about where consumer and enterprise attack surface is actually expanding. A flagship phone falling three times in a single day to three independently developed exploit chains is a strong signal that its security model has specific, discoverable weak points, not just theoretical ones. An AI database, an LLM gateway, and an agent coding tool all falling to injection-style bugs on their first appearance in a major public contest confirms what security teams have been warning about privately for over a year: AI infrastructure is being deployed faster than it is being hardened, and the same input-validation mistakes that plagued early web apps are resurfacing in AI tooling built by well-funded, security-conscious companies.
The smart-home results carry their own warning. Home Assistant Green and the Philips Hue Bridge Pro both fell repeatedly to independent teams, which suggests that the complexity of modern home-automation stacks, often built on open-source cores with dozens of third-party integrations, is outpacing the ability of any single vendor to audit every code path. For a device category that sits inside millions of homes with direct access to door locks, cameras, and occupancy data, that is not a small concern.
Market Impact: Vendors, Research Teams, and Security Spend
For the vendors involved, Pwn2Own results are simultaneously bad press and free, high-quality penetration testing. Samsung, Oracle, Philips, Sonos, Lexmark, Canon, Garmin, and the teams behind OpenAI Codex, LiteLLM, Chroma, and Nvidia Dynamo all receive detailed technical write-ups on exploitable flaws in their shipping products, delivered by some of the most capable offensive security researchers in the world, for a fraction of what an equivalent internal red-team engagement covering this much breadth would cost. That dynamic is precisely why large technology companies continue to fund ZDI’s prize pools even when the contest results generate unflattering headlines about their products.
For the research side of the market, Pwn2Own results function as a form of advertising. Teams such as VinSOC, Summoning Team, Interrupt Labs, Ikotas Labs, and Viettel Cyber Security use strong contest showings to attract commercial penetration-testing and vulnerability-research contracts the rest of the year. A team that can demonstrate a working seven-bug chain against a Philips smart-home hub on a live clock has a credible claim to being able to find comparable flaws in a paying client’s product before it ships, which is a far more persuasive sales pitch than a resume line.
Historical Context: How Pwn2Own Became Cybersecurity’s Super Bowl
Pwn2Own started in 2007 as a single-category contest focused on cracking laptops at the CanSecWest conference, with a $10,000 prize pool that seemed generous at the time. The Ireland contest specifically has become the venue for mobile phones and home-networking gear, which is why Samsung and Google flagship devices have become recurring, high-profile targets there in recent years. The addition of an AI Infrastructure category in 2026 marks the event’s biggest structural expansion since the Automotive spinoff, and it mirrors the industry’s broader shift: the attack surface security researchers are paid to probe now includes the AI pipelines enterprises are racing to deploy, not just the devices sitting on a kitchen counter.
What Comes Next: Predictions for the Rest of 2026 and Into 2027
- Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 is finished, and Trend Micro’s October 13 release reported awards of over $1.2 million, well above the 2025 event’s final total near $800,000-plus.
- Samsung is likely to ship an emergency or expedited patch for the Galaxy S26’s Confused Deputy flaw well inside the standard 90-day window, given the device fell to the same general class of attack multiple times in public view.
- AI Infrastructure will almost certainly return as a category at Pwn2Own Vancouver or Toronto in 2027, likely with an expanded target list that could include additional agent frameworks and vector databases beyond Chroma.
- Expect copycat vulnerability research aimed at the Home Assistant ecosystem to accelerate in open-source bug trackers over the next two quarters, as independent researchers try to replicate the attention the platform received at this year’s contest.
- Smart-speaker and smart-hub vendors, having watched the Sonos Era 300 and Philips Hue Bridge Pro fall repeatedly across two straight years of Pwn2Own Ireland contests, are likely to face renewed pressure from enterprise customers and insurers to publish third-party security audit results alongside their consumer marketing.
Competitive Landscape: How Pwn2Own Stacks Up Against Other Bounty Models
Pwn2Own’s live, time-boxed format is a deliberate contrast to the always-open bug bounty programs run by individual vendors. Platforms like HackerOne, Bugcrowd, and Synack let researchers submit findings whenever they surface them, with payouts scaled by severity rather than contest placement. Gaming and tech platforms including Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, and Riot run their own year-round programs with bounty ceilings that can reach into six figures for the most severe findings. Pwn2Own’s advantage is concentration: by putting a fixed set of devices on stage for a fixed window, it forces direct, public comparison between independent research teams attacking the exact same target, which is something a distributed bounty program structurally cannot replicate. Vercel’s recent $50,000 payout for a KVM zero-day used in a VM-escape attack shows the same incentive structure working in the always-open model, just without the theater.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Pwn2Own Ireland 2026?
It is a live hacking contest run by TrendAI Zero Day Initiative in October 2026, where security researchers compete to exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in consumer and enterprise devices for cash prizes.
How much money has been paid out at Pwn2Own Ireland 2026?
ZDI confirmed $388,500 for 32 unique zero-days on Day One, and Day Two’s publicly confirmed payouts added at least $220,000 more. By the time the full four-day contest closed, the final tally reached $1,262,000 in total prizes for 98 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities.
How many times was the Samsung Galaxy S26 hacked?
Six times across the first two days: three successful exploit chains on Day One and three more on Day Two, according to ZDI’s published day-by-day results.
What vulnerability let researchers break into the Galaxy S26?
The Day Two win that claimed the round used a Confused Deputy vulnerability (CWE-441), a flaw class in which a privileged system component performs an action on behalf of a less-trusted one without properly verifying authorization. Full technical details of all Galaxy S26 chains remain under embargo during the coordinated disclosure window.
What happens to the bugs found at Pwn2Own?
ZDI privately reports every successful exploit to the affected vendor, which then has a standard coordinated-disclosure window, commonly up to 90 days, to investigate and patch the flaw before technical details are published.
Which AI products were hacked at Pwn2Own Ireland 2026?
LiteLLM, OpenAI Codex, Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database, Nvidia Dynamo, and the Chroma vector database were all successfully exploited in the contest’s new AI Infrastructure category.
Who is leading the Master of Pwn competition?
Ikotas Labs took the Master of Pwn title outright, closing the contest with $361,000 in winnings and 42.5 points, fueled in large part by a $300,000 compromise of the Pixel 10. VinSOC, Interrupt Labs, and Xint each posted multiple wins across the contest, while defending champion Summoning Team also stayed on the board.
How does Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 compare to 2025?
The 2026 contest trailed 2025’s pace on Day One payouts ($388,500 versus $522,500) and zero-day counts (32 versus 34), likely because research effort was split across a brand-new AI Infrastructure category that did not exist last year, but it closed at $1,262,000 for 98 zero-days.
