Hackers Earn Over $520,000 on First Day of Pwn2Own Ireland 2025

On the first day of the Pwn2Own Ireland 2025 hacking contest, participants earned a total of $522,500 for exploits demonstrated against printers, NAS devices, routers and smart home products. A total of 34 previously unknown vulnerabilities were exploited. The largest prize, $100,000, was awarded in the SOHO Smashup category for chained exploits targeting the QNAP Qhora-322 router and the QNAP TS-453E NAS.

Other notable rewards included $50,000 for a Synology ActiveProtect Appliance DP320 exploit and the same amount for a Sonos Era 300 smart speaker hack, with $40,000 awarded for additional Synology and QNAP NAS exploits and other devices.

Hacking Canon and HP printers earned researchers $20,000 and $10,000 respectively, and the event will continue until Thursday when a researcher is scheduled to demonstrate a zero-click remote code execution exploit against WhatsApp in the hopes of winning $1 million, according to Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. Eduard Kovacs is the author of this SecurityWeek report dated 22 October 2025.