Both Pwnium fifa coins and Pwn Own were part of this year's CanSecWestsecurityconference in Vancouver, where hackers gather to win prizes put upby large tech companies for finding vulnerabilities in software. Pwn Ownset achallenge of finding zero-day exploits in popular browsers, whichthis year meant the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer,Safari and Chrome, running on either Windows or OS X Lion.Pwniums and were set up by Google in previous years to focus onthe Chrome browser, but its inclusion in Pwn Own meant they shiftedfocus to Chrome OS for Pwnium and even with an extendeddeadline, it came away without suffering a serious breach.
Entrants to Pwnium were given a Samsung Series Chromebookand january through to pm on March to look for holes, a deadline that was extendeduntil pm at the request of frustrated hackers. They had goodincentive to find holes, too, as Google was offering for every "browser or system level compromise in guestmode or as a logged-in user and for every"compromise with device persistence, guest to guest with interimreboot.