Security experts from Qihoo 360 deliver a keynote speech during the POC 2016 held on Nov 10, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn)
"We've been doing R&D (research and development) in this area since two years ago," Yan Minrui said. "The communication between the auto manufactures and us is going smoothly as we continually exploit vulnerabilities in automated driving systems for autonomous vehicles that can be adopted by the companies as technology improvements."
According to Yan Minrui, the presentation has also been delivered at the PacSec Applied Security Conference held earlier in Tokyo.
PwnFest, a two-day bug exploiting and pwning contest were also concurrently organized with the POC.
The target of the contest was chosen in a variety of systems that updated recently, including Microsoft Edge, Android 7.0, Microsoft Hyper-V, Google Chrome, Apple iOS 10 and Safari + Mac OS X Sierra, Adobe Flash and VMware Workstation Pro 12.
The overall $1.7 million prize for winning the contest, sponsored by the companies that own the systems, is the highest of similar hackers' pwning matches.
A contestant will get three exploit attempts during his demonstration and each attempt must be finished within four minutes.
Three teams from Qihoo 360, named Vulcan, Marvel and Alpha, participated in pwning bugs on Microsoft Edge, VMware Workstation, Google's Pixel and Adobe Flash Player.
Zheng Wenbin, known as MJ0011, the general manager of 360's core security department, heads the vulnerability research team, which has achieved hundreds of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) from Microsoft, Apple and Adobe.
Being a regular at POC, Zheng said that although the numbers of attendees and topics of POC were fewer than some of the word's high-profile hackers' events, such as Black Hat, some of the issues on the agenda were about cutting-edge technologies in the security industry.
As of Thursday, the Microsoft Edge and VMware Workstation pwning challenge was beaten by the team, and the latter is an almost perfect virtual system that hasn't been cracked by hackers for seven years.
Since 2009, Microsoft has thanked Qihoo 360 for assisting the company detecting vulnerabilities and bugs.