from securityfocus.com
On Monday, security firm Tipping Point agreed to offer up to $20,000 as a prize to the first person to compromise each of three laptops running popular operating systems in the second annual PWN2OWN Competition at the CanSecWest conference, which takes place in Vancouver this week. The boost in the bounties came after researchers criticized the company for the more modest prizes announced last week. The first person to compromise any of three laptop computers — running the latest versions of Apple’s Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux — will receive the prize money and the laptop.

“Based on the current feedback, we’ve agreed to keep this contest a ‘best of the best’ showdown, and therefore only one cash prize will be offered per machine,” Terri Forslof, manager of security response for TippingPoint, said in the company’s blog post revising the rules. “Our original goal in offering the chance for multiple persons to compete for cash prizes — even after the boxes were pwned — was to create more opportunity and fairness to the contestants and alleviate issues of timing around who gets to go first.”