Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 - Windows 11 and Microsoft Exchange hacked

Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 is wrapping up today at the OffensiveCon conference, and across two confirmed days the numbers are significant. Researchers have collected over $908,000 in prizes after demonstrating 39 unique zero-day vulnerabilities across Windows 11, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Edge, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Nvidia infrastructure, and a string of AI platforms. Day 3 results are still to come.

Day 1 – Edge falls, Windows 11 hacked three times

Day 1 paid out $523,000 across 24 zero-days. The standout was Orange Tsai of the DEVCORE Research Team, who chained four logic bugs to escape the Microsoft Edge sandbox and earn $175,000 in a single demonstration. Windows 11 was hacked three separate times by three independent researchers, each earning $30,000 for privilege escalation zero-days. Valentina Palmiotti of IBM X-Force collected $70,000 across two separate exploits targeting the NVIDIA Container Toolkit and Red Hat Linux. The AI category was equally active: LiteLLM, OpenAI Codex, NVIDIA Megatron Bridge, Chroma, and LM Studio all fell on Day 1.

Day 2 - Exchange compromised for $200,000

Day 2 paid out $385,750 across 15 zero-days. Orange Tsai appeared again, this time chaining three bugs to gain remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on a fully patched Microsoft Exchange Server, the single highest-earning exploit of the competition so far at $200,000. Windows 11 was hacked again on Day 2, as was the Cursor AI coding agent. OpenAI Codex was also targeted for a second time by a different researcher.

Capacity packed

The event hit capacity for the first time in its 19-year history. Over 150 researchers were turned away due to scheduling limits, with some dropping zero-days publicly rather than waiting for next year. All vendors have 90 days from disclosure to patch the flaws demonstrated at Pwn2Own.

Notebookcheck covered Google's confirmation of the first AI-developed zero-day earlier this month, in which an AI model wrote and deployed a functional exploit targeting a 2FA bypass in a widely used web administration tool