Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 Hacking Competition Demonstrates Exploitation of Multiple Critical Vulnerabilities

At the Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, held during the OffensiveCon conference from May 15th to 17th, security researchers demonstrated the exploitation of twenty (20) zero-day vulnerabilities over the first two (2) days, earning a total reward of $695,000. Mozilla addressed two (2) critical Firefox vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-4918 and CVE-2025-4919) disclosed during the contest, which allowed out-of-bounds access in JavaScript components but did not bypass the browser sandbox. These flaws, credited to researchers from Palo Alto Networks and independent expert Manfred Paul, were patched in Firefox 138.0.4 and related ESR versions. On the second day of the event, standout exploits included a $150,000 VMware ESXi integer overflow by STARLabs SG, a $100,000 SharePoint auth bypass and deserialization chain by Viettel Cyber Security, and successful zero-days in Firefox, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle VirtualBox, and AI platforms like Redis and Nvidia’s Triton Inference Server. With over $1 million in potential rewards across enterprise, cloud, AI, and automotive targets, Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 highlighted ongoing researcher focus on high-impact enterprise and virtualization vulnerabilities. CTIX will continue to report on novel critical vulnerabilities to keep our readers informed of potential gaps in security.