Where in the world did this fantastic idea come from?
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#Summary_of_successful_...
https://threatpost.com/baseband-zero-day-exposes-millions-of...
To me the history of Pwn2Own exactly shows the trend I'm talking about. Going from very successful editions to increasingly less successful editions as the years go by to the point where the competition barely even exists anymore.
And then that baseband firmware exploit, that's the dream. You could hack any device with that almost regardless of what software runs on top. I put that in the same class as the Intel chip vulnerabilities.
Per the slides over 150 of those kernel bugs resulted in code execution, and that is already a lowball count of the true number. Upstream Linux, being possibly the most visible and well-resourced OS codebase around, even by 2019 does not have the tools necessary just to automatically find the bugs we already know exist.
I don't suppose there's any more information - it sounds like an interesting tale.