Three Remote Hacks Hit a Fully Patched Pixel 10

Three Remote Hacks Hit a Fully Patched Pixel 10

The most interesting number from Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 is not the prize money. It is the number of teams that walked into a fully patched Google Pixel 10 on the same day and came back out with code execution.

On 8 October, three separate research teams exploited the Pixel 10 at the contest in Cork — remotely, over the network, on a device the rules require to be running the latest firmware (Zero Day Initiative). Together the three wins paid out $562,500. A fourth Pixel attempt, on day one, ran out of time before it worked. That is four serious teams aiming at one phone in three days, and three of them succeeded.

This is what a modern mobile attack surface looks like.

What "fully patched" actually means here

Pwn2Own is not a bug hunt where contestants get a head start. The rules require every target to run the newest available firmware, and a winning entry has to demonstrate real code execution or pull off the attacker's chosen objective (contest rules). When a team breaks a phone at this contest, the phone was patched as well as Google could make it that week.

There is a wrinkle worth stating plainly: a collision. If a bug was already known to the vendor or to the organisers, ZDI still accepts the entry but pays a reduced award and marks it a collision. So a "success with a collision" can mean the flaw was already on someone's list — but not necessarily fixed. At least two of the three Pixel wins used a bug that was already known before the attempt.

That distinction matters more than the scoreboard. A collision is evidence that the vendor knew about a weakness and the weakness was still exploitable at contest time.

The three Pixel wins

• Xint (Tim Becker and Yves Bieri) got in with a single bug collision, earning $150,000 and 15 points.
• Ikotas Labs chained multiple issues, earning $300,000 — the contest's single biggest prize — and 30 points. ZDI marked it a success with a collision.
• Dimitrios Valsamaras, Ken Gannon (using Djini.ai from Mobile Hacking Lab) and Tenia Valsamara of CENSUS Labs used a two-bug chain, one collision and one zero-day, for $112,500 and 22.5 points.

All three entries were registered as remote exploits, meaning the attacker breaks in through content in the default browser or over the air — NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or the cellular baseband — rather than by plugging in a cable. That is the realistic threat model for a phone, and it is why three successful remote wins in one day is a signal, not a parlor trick.

The Galaxy S26 told the same story, louder

Samsung's Galaxy S26 was attacked in all seven attempts made against it across the contest, and six of the seven winning entries included at least one collision. ZDI noted that one bug in the chain Ikotas Labs used on day one "was already known to the vendor (yet unpatched)" (The Hacker News).

Read that phrase again, because it is the whole problem: known to the vendor, still unpatched, and then used to break the device in a live contest. Patch availability and patch deployment are not the same thing, and neither is the same as a vulnerable branch still shipping to someone.

Ikotas Labs ran the table

Ikotas Labs did not only break phones. Its four wins across the contest added up to $361,000, 42.5 points and 13 unique bugs, which made it Master of Pwn — the title for the contestant with the most points. Besides the Pixel 10 and the Galaxy S26, the team also exploited OpenAI's Codex coding agent with a single argument-injection bug and, on the second day, Oracle's Autonomous AI Database (Zero Day Initiative).

That mix is the headline: phones, an AI coding agent, and a database, all broken by one team in a week. The Codex result is a reminder that the tooling developers now point at their own source code is itself a target — something we looked at in our breakdown of Codex sandbox escapes.

Across all seven categories, competitors demonstrated 98 zero-days and collected $1,262,000 (BleepingComputer). Apple's iPhone 17 carried a remote-hack top prize of $300,000 and drew no registered attempt — an absence you can read either way.

Nobody has to act on this yet

It is important not to overreact to a contest result.

ZDI had not published how the three Pixel exploits work as of 9 October. When it does, the vendors get 90 days to ship a fix before the technical details go public. Google's own October Pixel bulletin, published on 6 October, does not mention the contest, and there is no fix listed and no action for Pixel owners tied to these results today.

So the practical takeaway is not "your Pixel is hacked right now." It is the trend: a fully patched flagship phone was taken over remotely by three independent teams in a single day, and one of the ingredients was something the vendor already knew about.

The part you can actually do something about

There is one concrete, verifiable action hiding in this story. In September, Google patched CVE-2026-58704, a flaw in the Pixel cellular modem — a permission bypass reachable from a nearby attacker with no interaction from the victim. Google's September bulletin warned that the bug "may be under limited, targeted exploitation" (Android Security Bulletin), CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog the next day, and federal agencies were given until 19 September to patch (CVE-2026-58704 is rated CVSS 8.8) (NVD).

That one you can check in seconds. If you have a Pixel and adb installed:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Check whether a Pixel is at or past the September 2026 patch level,
# the build that carries the fix for CVE-2026-58704.
set -euo pipefail

REQUIRED="2026-09-05"          # Pixel Update Bulletin, September 2026
level="$(adb shell getprop ro.build.version.security_patch | tr -d '\r')"

if [ -z "$level" ]; then
  echo "No device reachable over adb." >&2
  exit 2
fi

echo "Device patch level: $level"
if [[ "$level" > "$REQUIRED" || "$level" == "$REQUIRED" ]]; then
  echo "OK: at or past the required patch level."
else
  echo "UPDATE: device is behind $REQUIRED. Check Settings > System > Software update." >&2
  exit 1
fi

ISO dates compare correctly as strings, so the lexicographic check is safe. Run it, and if a phone comes back behind 2026-09-05, update it.

The broader lesson is less comfortable. A contest that requires fully patched targets exists precisely to show what patching does not cover. Three teams proved on 8 October that the answer is still "plenty."

Sources

• Zero Day Initiative: Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 - Day Three Results & Master of Pwn
• The Hacker News: Three Teams Demonstrate Remote Hacks of Fully Patched Google Pixel 10 at Pwn2Own
• BleepingComputer: Hackers get $1,262,000 for 98 zero-days at Pwn2Own Ireland
• Zero Day Initiative: Pwn2Own Ireland 2026 Rules
• Android Open Source Project: Pixel Update Bulletin - September 2026
• NIST NVD: CVE-2026-58704 Detail