Korean Rookie Hackers' Journey: Road to Pwn2Own with a VirtualBox Exploit

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Presented at Hexacon 2025 by

HanseoKim

This talk explores how rookie hackers are trained and grow within Korea’s security ecosystem, and how our team collaborated to tackle a complex vulnerability in the VirtualBox virtualization platform. We provide a brief overview of VirtualBox’s architecture and attack surface, then detail the vulnerability’s unique characteristics, the custom exploit primitive we developed, and the technical challenges we overcame. The talk concludes with how our exploit led to a successful win at Pwn2Own 2025.