Announcing Pwn2Own Berlin for 2026

Announcing Pwn2Own Berlin for 2026 🚀

Pwn2Own returns to Berlin and OffensiveCon! Last year, we added Artificial Intelligence as a category with great results. This year, we’re expanding this and splitting it into multiple different categories: AI Databases, Coding Agents, Local Inferences, and a separate category for NVIDIA products. The folks from AWS wanted to get into the fray as well, so they stepped up to co-sponsor this year’s event, which allows us to increase the reward for bugs in Firecracker.

Of course, we have all of the returning categories as well, including web browsers, containers, servers, virtualization, and operating systems. There’s more than $1,000,000 in cash and prizes available for contestants! Last year, we awarded $1,078,750 for 28 unique 0-days over the three-day event.

The contest begins on May 14, but registration closes on May 7. For 2026, we have a total of 31 targets across 10 categories. The person or team with the most points at the end of the contest will be crowned Master of Pwn, receive 65,000 ZDI reward points, a killer trophy, and a pretty snazzy jacket! 🏆

Categories and Prizes 💰

• Virtualization Category:
  • VMware ESXi returns with an award of $150,000. Last year produced the first ESXi exploits in Pwn2Own history.
  • Microsoft also returns as a target and leads the virtualization category with a $250,000 award for a successful Hyper-V Client guest-to-host escalation.
  • Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is our final target in this category with a prize of $50,000.
  • Additionally, if a contestant can escape the guest OS, then gain arbitrary code execution on the virtualization target and obtain arbitrary code execution in the guest operating system on a separate virtual machine managed by the same targeted virtualization target, they’ll earn another $50,000. That could push the payout on an ESXi bug to $200,000!
• Enterprise Applications:
  • Targets include Adobe Reader and various Office components. Prizes in this category run from $50,000 for a Reader exploit with a sandbox escape or a Reader exploit with a kernel privilege escalation, and $150,000 for an Office 365 application.
  • This year, we’re adding a bonus for Copilot data exfiltration and Copilot action execution. If you’re able to exploit Copilot in addition to a Microsoft application, you’ll earn an additional $50,000!
• Server Category:
  • Focuses solely on the server components we’re most interested in. These servers are often targeted by everyone from ransomware crews to nation/state actors.
  • Microsoft Exchange has been a popular target for some time, and it returns as a target this year as well, with a payout of $200,000.
  • This category is rounded out by Microsoft Windows RDP/RDS, which also has a payout of $200,000.
  • For the new AI Coding Agent category, a successful entry must interact with a contestant-controlled resource to exploit a vulnerability within the coding agent. The attack vector of the entry must be a common coding agent use case.

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