<p>It's back to the drawing board for coders at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Mozilla, and Oracle after entrants in the annual Pwn2Own contest waltzed off with over half a million dollars in prizes for exploiting security holes in popular software.</p><p>At this year's CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, contestants had a choice of two hacking contests; the traditional Pwn2Own trial against Internet Explorer 10, Firefox, Chrome, Java, and Adobe's Reader and Flash, plus Google's own Pwnium contest which this time focused on cracking Chrome OS.</p><p>HP provided most of the sponsorship for Pwn2Own this year, and Brian Gorenc, head of its DVLabs team, told The Register that the company had paid out $480,000 in cash to the crackers, along with laptops and subscriptions that brings the total prize pot to over half a million dollars.</p><p>"It's a really good investment," he explained. "It puts us on the cutting edge of security research and we get to see the latest and greatest attack techniques, which we can then feed into our other security products," Gorenc said.</p><p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/pwn2own_contest_cansecwest/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/07/pwn2own-results-java-chrome-ie-10-and-firefox-owned-on-day-one/">PWN2OWN results Day One - Java, Chrome, IE 10 and Firefox owned</a> (Naked Security)</p><p><a href="http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/03/08/pwn2own-2013/1">Pwn2Own competitors crack Chrome, Firefox, IE and Java</a> (bit-tech.net)</p><p><a href="http://www.scmagazine.com/down-go-chrome-firefox-ie-10-java-win-8-at-pwn2own-hacker-fest/article/283356/">Down go Chrome, Firefox, IE 10, Java, Win 8 at Pwn2Own hacker fest</a> (SC Magazine)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dQSO5dAlQiph7HMC6NDtUvONck2kM&ned=us">41 additional articles.</a></p>