CanSec

It’s become a familiar walk for Chaouki Bekrar. Year after year at the Pwn2Own contest, the controversial Vupen founder is scurried from a small room in the basement of the Sheraton hotel to a suite several floors above. It’s a short journey from where a string of zero-day exploits are executed to where formal disclosure is made to the vendor in question. It’s also where payment is arranged, and on this day, exclusivity is promised to HP’s Zero Day Initiative.

Google will once again play host to the Pwnium hacking contest to draw star hackers and crackers out of the woodwork. Prizes up to $2.7 million total will go to anyone who can hack Chrome OS so Google can better patch specific exploits and issues. If you're up to the task, there are several cash prizes at stake, which you could take home as an individual or a member of a team.

Research teams Wednesday cracked Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 (IE10), Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox at the Pwn2Own hacking contest, pulling in more than $250,000 in prizes.

Earlier in the day, a solo hacker exploited Oracle's Java to win $20,000.

The new year is barely two months old and it's already been a brutal one for the disclosure of new vulnerabilities. Java, Adobe Reader, Flash, Google Chrome and a number of other widely deployed applications have all been hit with a slew of serious bugs in just the last few weeks. And that's likely to get worse this week as researchers convene in Vancouver for the Pwn2Own and Pwnium hacking contests.

Charlie Miller won’t be defending his Pwn2Own hacking crown this year.

Miller, a Pwn2Own regular who makes headlines every year for his work breaking into fully patched Mac OS X machines, says he is skipping the contest this year because of the new rules that require on-the-spot writing of exploits.