Regarding Pwn2Own Vancouver

As have many around the world, we at the Zero Day Initiative have been closely monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified the coronavirus as a pandemic and have called on people to take “urgent and aggressive action” to help prevent the spread of the disease. While it had been our intent to take all measures to physically be in Vancouver for CanSecWest and Pwn2Own, we have made the difficult decision to hold the contest completely virtually.

We had previously announced contestants would be allowed to compete remotely in this year’s competition. That remains true. However, instead of ZDI researchers running the attempts in Vancouver, they will do all attempts from our office in Austin, Texas. We will be in communication with the researchers either by phone or video chat during the attempts. Once vetted, we’ll disclose the bugs to the vendors in a similar manner. Vendors will still receive all of the same information as they would if we held the contest in Vancouver. We had already received notification that some vendors would not be traveling to the competition this year and had planned for this eventuality.

What won’t change is the scheduling. We’ll be running these attempts during the CanSecWest conference and passing results to the conference organizers for them to share with attendees. We’ll be videoing and live blogging all attempts and tweeting results as they come in, too. It’s our goal to ensure as many as possible see the results of the tremendous research done by the Pwn2Own contestants.

While we are certainly disappointed that we will not be visiting Vancouver and attending the CanSecWest conference, prudence dictates we take these measures to help protect contestants and ZDI personnel and to do our part to help stop the spread of this global pandemic. We thank our contestants, our partners, and our sponsors for working with us through these changes. We look forward to seeing some great research next week, and we hope to see everyone face-to-face in the future.