Hackers win $1 million for discovering 61 mobile vulnerabilities
MEXICO CITY (apro). A group of hackers discovered 61 security vulnerabilities in popular mobile devices, and revealed them, winning a prize of one million dollars.
These devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S21 smartphone, were hacked twice, during the Pwn2Own competition, which ran from November 2-5 in Austin, Texas, United States.
The competition, organized by the Zero Day Initiative, a program of the technology security company Trend Micro, was a ‘smartphone’ hack, which specialists did, but the hackers discovered 61 vulnerabilities, for the first time, in electronic devices.
The Zero Day Vulnerability Research Director said the aim of this competition is to strengthen platforms by exposing their vulnerabilities and present this research to vendors.
“The goal is always to fix these errors before they can be effectively exploited by the attackers,” the expert explained.
In parallel, new iPhone functionality has put Facebook, which is hungry for data about its users, in a tight spot due to Apple’s so-called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which reduces tracking capacity by asking for explicit permission, which will cost social media companies 10 billion of Loss of revenue during the second half of the year.
According to the Financial Times, the revenue loss is due to the majority of iPhone users refusing to follow companies like Facebook, leaving their advertisers stuck, anonymised, and barely redirected to Apple users.
For this reason, advertisers who often use Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to target iPhone users, are now taking their business elsewhere, to Android and even Apple’s advertising business.
“Apple’s decision to change privacy settings for iPhones caused an estimated $9.85 billion in revenue to evaporate in the second half of this year on Span, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as its advertising business was affected by the new rules,” The Financial wrote. times.
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