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The next Pwn2Own hacking event is coming to the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, running between 22–24March this year — and two Teslas will be up for grabs.
Pwn2Own is on its 16th year and is an annual white hat hacking competition that offers a host of prizes to participants, as well as helping many companies keep their products more secure.
There will be two Teslas on offer to hack, a Model 3 and a Model S, with the winner walking away with US$600,000 — and the car they hacked, too.
The Teslas will be the focus of two hacking categories: the automotive category and the newly introduced Steam VM Escape category. Since Tesla announced support for the Steam gaming platform last year — there are currently over 6,000 PC games that can be played on the car’s built-in console — that is yet another attack vector.
“Tesla vehicles are equipped with multiple layers of security,” said a Pwn2Own spokesperson, “and for this year’s event, there are multiple tiers of awards within the automotive category that correspond to some of the different layers of security within a Tesla car.”
The full list of major categories is as follows:
The total prize pool this year, including the cars, is over US$1 million.
Like last year, this event will be hosted both in person and virtually.
“Similar to last year, we’ll be holding a hybrid conference with most of us in person,” said Pwn2Own.
“The other part of the hybrid event means that we also allow remote participation. If you have either travel restrictions or travel safety concerns, you can opt to compete remotely.”
You can find full details of the event at the official website here, including how to sign up if you want to try your hand at some cool hacks on the other side of the planet. And if you want to see just how hackable modern cars can be, we covered one hacking group’s efforts to compromise cars from 16 different automotive manufacturers here.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.