



The PwnFest hacking competition, held in Seoul yesterday saw an interesting demonstration by a white-hat hacker group, called Qihoo 360. The hack successfully targeted Google's shiny new Pixel handset, won the group a $120,000 cash prize and opened-up a lot of patching work for Google.





Both the regular Pixel and Pixel XL versions of the smartphone appear to be susceptible to the attack that utilizes what is know as a zero-day vulnerability. What that essentially means is a hole in the device's security, that was present on the initial software the units shipped with. And to our knowledge, no subsequent patches have remedied the issue, yet.





This was quite aptly put, since the video demonstrated clearly that on the attacker's side, there was access to the phone's full list of permissions, thanks to a background, rogue app install. That practically leaves all of your data, including multimedia, contacts and even communication channels open to whatever form of exploitation the attacker sees fit. Scary, indeed.