Your light bulb hub lasted about a morning at Pwn2Own

The Philips Hue Bridge Pro is the small white box that makes smart bulbs work. On the first morning of Pwn2Own Ireland, two researchers from VinSOC broke into one, and they were not the only team to manage it that day.

The contest is run by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative and started on 6 October. Twenty-one attempts were made on day one and seventeen of them worked, with the organisers' tally for the day coming to 397,250 dollars. The Hue Bridge Pro drew 52,000 dollars across the teams that cracked it. A Sonos Era 300 speaker went for 67,500, a Samsung Galaxy S26 for 57,750 across three separate chains, a Lexmark CX532adwe office printer for 30,000, and a Garmin Index BPM for 20,000. A crack at the Google Pixel 10 failed. Infosecurity Magazine counted 32 separate previously unknown flaws used across the day.

None of this leaks into the wild. Everything demonstrated goes straight to the manufacturer, which gets 90 days to ship a fix before the details are published. That part works well. The part that works less well is at your end, because the devices on that list are exactly the ones nobody thinks about. A printer, a speaker and a lighting hub sit on the same home network as the laptop you do your banking on, and most people have never opened their settings pages, let alone checked whether automatic updates are switched on. They usually are, but not always, and the option is often buried three menus deep.

Start by finding out what is actually connected. Tendvane's network scan lists every device on your home network, which for most people turns up two or three they had completely forgotten about.