On day three of the Pwn2Own 2017 hacking contest held in Vancouver on Friday, a guest at system Windows installed on VMware Workstation managed to "escape" twice.
The Chinese team of security company Qihoo 360 started by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Edge browser that allowed it to "leave" the VMware virtual machine, and reach the main system. The team from this attack managed to win a prize of 105.000 dollars.
The second VMware Workstation breakout was done by the Tencent Security team, who won $100.000 for presentation of a Windows kernel use-after-free vulnerability combined with a “Workstation infoleak and an uninitialized buffer in Workstation to go guest-to-host.”
Both teams were able to escape virtual machines and were found to be the first and second respectively in the ranking of the competition.
In the previous days of Pwn2Own 2017, which we have described in an earlier publication, Flash, Windows Kernel, Microsoft Edge, MacOS Kernel, Firefox and Safari Apple's browser.
In October, Microsoft said it was aware of the four zero-day vulnerabilities in Edge, Office, and Internet Explorer.
