Vietnamese experts team wins world's largest cyber attack competition

In his speech at the final round of the "ASEAN Students with Information Security 2023" competition held on October 28, Mr. Tran Quang Hung, Deputy Director of the Department of Information Security (Ministry of Information and Communications) said that on the evening of October 27, a group of experts representing Viettel won the championship at the global cyber attack competition Pwn2Own, with an absolute score.

Pwn2Own is the world's largest and most prestigious cyber attack competition, organized annually by the Zero Day Initiative since 2007. This can be considered the World Cup of the security world with a total prize value of up to millions of USD, constantly attracting "masters" from famous technology corporations and leading security experts.

Taking place in Toronto (Canada), this year's Pwn20wn competition has 8 categories including mobile phones, smart home controllers, smart speakers, printers, monitoring devices, network storage devices, Google devices and small office devices, with more than 1 million USD in prize money. All are advanced devices from major companies and installed with the latest software versions. The teams have about 3 months to prepare to find previously undiscovered vulnerabilities, find ways to exploit them and will have about 30 minutes to perform a direct test attack on the target devices.

According to experts, Pwn2Own is always one of the most competitive security competitions, requiring participating teams to have good skills and be well-prepared in many aspects. Although there are many months to find bugs, the challenge for the teams is to demonstrate the ability to attack that vulnerability in a short time.

In addition, vulnerabilities can be found and patched by the manufacturer before the competition. Therefore, participating teams often have to find as many vulnerabilities as possible and prepare backup attack plans if they want to achieve the highest score.

'Team Viettel', the name of the Viettel Cyber ​​Security experts participating in Pwn2Own this year, is mostly young engineers. The entire team is made up of engineers trained by this information security company, most of whom are members of the GenZ generation who have interned and joined the Viettel Cyber ​​Security team since they were students. The team registered for 7 categories, targeting the Xiaomi 13 Pro phone, QNAP storage system, Canon, HP, Lexmark printer categories, Sonos smart speakers, and SOHO SMASHUP.

At the end of the final round of the Pwn2Own Toronto 2023 competition on the evening of October 27, the Viettel Cyber ​​Security expert group named 'Team Viettel' officially won the highest victory with 30 'Master of Pwn' points. This result brought the team a prize of 180,000 USD, and more importantly, continued to bring the name of the Vietnamese information security community to the global stage.

In fact, since the competition began on October 24, 'Team Viettel' has been continuously leading. By October 26, this group of experts was almost certain to win the championship early when they created a gap in points with the teams behind, although there was still a category of their forte, 'SOHO SMASHUP', that had not yet taken place.

At the end of 4 days of competition, the Viettel Cyber ​​Security expert team completed excellently and achieved absolute scores in all 7 registered exams, while many strong competitors encountered problems such as duplicate vulnerabilities and unsuccessful exploitation.

About 80% of the members of 'Team Viettel' are GenZ, those born between 1997 and 2012. "That shows that we have a generation with high expectations for national information security, a generation that will contribute to bringing Vietnam's name to the region and the world more strongly," Mr. Hung shared.

In addition to Viettel's efforts, the representative of the Department of Information Security said that the high results of the Vietnamese expert group also recognized the journey of agencies, organizations and enterprises in developing human resources for network information security for the country. Most of the members of the 'Viettel team' that just won the international award also participated in the 'Students with information security' contest organized by the Vietnam Information Security Association - VNISA in coordination with agencies and units over the past 16 years.

The results of the Pwn2Own Toronto 2023 competition also showed that, in addition to Viettel's team, there are many other high-ranking teams with Vietnamese members. For example, 'Team Orca' of Sea Security Company (Singapore) has a majority of Vietnamese members, or the team from another Vietnamese enterprise, VNG.

“The fact that many Vietnamese teams and other international teams have Vietnamese members participating in Pwn2Own this year is a source of pride for us, when Vietnamese experts participate and achieve high results in a large international playground, recognized by the world,” said Mr. Tran Quang Hung.

However, the fact that many Vietnamese information security experts participate in competitions with teams of foreign companies also shows that many Vietnamese talents are working abroad. From the perspective of state management of the field of network information security, the representative of the Information Security Department said: It is necessary to review and re-evaluate so that the current generation of Vietnamese students will develop more, contribute more, and more directly to the country in the future.