Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

In a spectacular effort rewarded with over $200,000, a Chinese security team that goes by the name of ‘Tencent Keen’ managed to breach most of the mobile challenges in Trend Micro’s  Masters of Pwn contest in Tokyo this week (Thursday Oct 27).

Miss spelled and often pronounced, the term ‘pwn’ refers to the verb ‘own’ and is generally regarded as the term that best describes domination of a rival. It comes from the online video culture and has been adopted by hackers as a way to describe taking control of a computer.

Both the Tencent Keen and MWR Labs teams (creators of the Drozer and Needle frameworks) were unable to successfully demonstrate the ability to remotely install a rogue application persistently but don’t think all you Smart phone users are safe just yet. Both teams showed some success earlier and were just not able to execute it during the 20 minute testing periods.

Trend Micro still paid out almost $400.000 to help understand how these bugs work so lets hope that these vulnerabilities will be mitigated in their newest mobile security software. Learn more about the event here