Apple’s flagship handset, the iPhone 4, and RIM’s BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone were the latest devices yielded to hackers at the Pwn2Own hacking contest that has been taking place at the three-day long CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Charlie Miller and Dion Blazakis, who work for the Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) consulting firm, brought down thw iPhone’s operating system.

Speaking on the iPhone hack, Miller said, “This one was pretty hard. Different bugs take different exploits, and this one was hard to exploit.”

On the BlackBerry, a team of researchers including Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Vincenzo Iozzo, Blazakis and Miller, successful hacked the hacking the Torch 9800.

The annual hacking contest Pwn2Own pits hackers against popular web browsers and mobile phone platforms. This year, the list of targeted browsers includes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla’s Firefox3.6, Apple’s Safari 5 and Google’s Chrome 9.

The iOS-based iPhone 4, Windows 7-based Dell Venue Pro and BlackBerry OS 6-based Torch 9800 and Android-based Nexus S smartphones were also put forward to be hacked.

Pwn2Own hacking contest started on March 9 and will come to end on March 11.