Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 Day 2: Exchange, Windows 11, Red Hat

Microsoft Exchange just took a $200,000 bounty at Pwn2Own Berlin — the single largest payout of the contest. Day two added another $385,750 across 15 working zero-days. Orange Tsai of DEVCORE — the same researcher who took down Microsoft Edge on day one for $175,000 — chained three bugs against on-prem Microsoft Exchange Server to land remote code execution as SYSTEM, the highest privilege level on Windows. That win pushed DEVCORE to a $405,000 lead on the Master of Pwn leaderboard. Windows 11 fell again on a separate exploit by Siyeon Wi, using an integer overflow for privilege escalation to administrator. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations was rooted by Ben Koo of Team DDOS using a use-after-free bug — the first non-Microsoft operating system to fall at this year's contest. The AI category kept dropping: Cursor fell to two different teams, OpenAI Codex and LM Studio both took second-round hits after also falling on day one, and Sina Kheirkhah's attempt against Anthropic's Claude Desktop hit a bug that was already known, still earning a partial $10,000 payout. Two attempts ran out the clock entirely — Microsoft SharePoint (Stephen Fewer, Rapid7) and Apple Safari's Renderer Only (Tao Yan & Edouard Bochin, Palo Alto Networks). Day two takes the contest total to $908,750 across 39 unique zero-days, with one day left. Sources: https://www.thezdi.com/blog/2026/5/15/pwn2own-berlin-2026-day-two-results https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/pwn2own-day-two-hackers-demo-microsoft-exchange-windows-11-red-had-enterprise-linux-zero-days/ More on cybersecurity, privacy, scams, and homelab on Hake Hardware. New shorts every weekday. #cybersecurity #pwn2own #zeroday