Microsoft Exchange, Windows 11 Hacked on Pwn2Own Day Two

During day two of Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, participants secured $385,750 in awards by demonstrating 15 distinct zero-day vulnerabilities across various products such as Windows 11, Microsoft Exchange, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations.

The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 contest runs at the OffensiveCon conference between May 14 and May 16, concentrating on enterprise technologies together with artificial intelligence. Researchers stand to gain more than 1000000 dollars in total cash and rewards through successful attacks on up-to-date, fully patched systems in areas covering web browsers, enterprise applications, cloud-native and container setups, virtualization platforms, local privilege escalation, servers, local inference, and LLM categories.

Event regulations specify that every device under test uses the newest operating system releases, with all submissions required to achieve full system takeover and show arbitrary code execution. After disclosure at the competition, manufacturers receive 90 days to develop and release fixes for the reported flaws.

A standout performance came from Cheng-Da Tsai, known as Orange Tsai, with the DEVCORE Research Team, who received $200,000 for linking three separate issues that delivered remote code execution at SYSTEM level against Microsoft Exchange. Siyeon Wi obtained $7,500 by leveraging an integer overflow to breach Windows 11, while Ben Koo from Team DDOS gained root access on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations and took home a $10,000 prize. Separately, 0xDACA and Noam Trobishi took advantage of a use-after-free vulnerability in the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

Within the AI track, Le Duc Anh Vu from Viettel Cyber Security earned $30,000 for compromising the Cursor AI coding assistant, Sina Kheirkhah representing Summoning Team showcased an OpenAI Codex flaw worth $20,000, and Compass Security demonstrated an exploit against Cursor for $15,000.

On the opening day, Orange Tsai had already claimed an additional $175,000 by combining 4 logic flaws that enabled a sandbox escape in Microsoft Edge. Valentina Palmiotti, operating under the name chompie for IBM X-Force Offensive Research, picked up $20,000 for achieving root on Red Hat Linux for Workstations plus $50,000 for a zero-day in the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

Windows 11 also fell three separate times during that initial day to Angelboy and TwinkleStar03 collaborating with the DEVCORE Internship Program, Kentaro Kawane from GMO Cybersecurity, and Marcin Wizowski; each researcher walked away with $30,000 for their fresh local privilege-escalation zero-days.

Day three of the competition will see attempts against Microsoft Windows 11, VMware ESXi, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft SharePoint, along with multiple AI coding tools.

During the previous Pwn2Own Berlin event, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative disbursed 1078750 dollars across 29 zero-day reports and several collisions.