Google pays $40K to 'Pinkie Pie' for partial hack of Chrome OS
Google today said it had paid a researcher $40,000 for a partial exploit of Chrome OS at its Pwnium 3 hacking contest two weeks ago.
The researcher, known as "Pinkie Pie," was the only participant who submitted an exploit during the challenge Google ran March 7 at CanSecWest, the Canadian security conference which also hosted the eighth-annual Pwn2Own contest.
Two others had been working on Chrome OS exploits for Pwnium, said Google, but neither wrapped up in time, even after the contest deadline was extended. According to Chris Evans, an engineer with the Chrome security team who announced the award on the Chromium blog, Pinkie Pie submitted a "plausible bug chain involving video parsing, a Linux kernel bug and a config file error" in Chrome OS, Google's browser-based operating system.
