According to Chris Evans, a software engineer at Google’s development team, “the Pwnium competition was intended to use Webkit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in order to exploit the renderer process and the next error in the IPC layer to get away with the Chrome sandbox”. Because of the code execution to rectify the bugs lying in Chrome, it was the highest level of award offered by Google which included a cash price of $60,000 along with a free Chrome-book.
Pinkie Pie was able to catch and amend this critical bug within just 10hrs which is quite incredible. Latterly, the bug was patched by the Google team and the fixed version of Chrome has been already on-aired.
A similar incident took place in March at the Pwn2own event, when a Russian teenager was shown up to display the first zero-day exploit in Chrome and the lucky hacker was awarded with the same amount by Google. Such kinds of events surely boost up the confidence level of talented youngsters, also provide useful opportunities to show their skills on a large-scale.
Hopefully the idea would be followed by other giants of the software industry as well, such as Facebook, PayPal, and Etsy that could help the new talent to get transformed into precious gems of IT.
