Reward For iOS 10 Jailbreak Hits A Staggering $1.5 Million
A big bounty has been declared for jailbreaking iOS 10 but it isn't Apple that will be paying up but U.S-based information security company Zerodium.
Zerodium is offering payouts up to $1.5 million for identifying so-far unreported vulnerabilities in the latest Apple OS release. This is the company's biggest yet bounty for hackers succeeding in breaking Apple's famed security measures.
"We've increased the price due to the increased security for both iOS 10 and Android 7, and we would like to attract more researchers all year long, not just during a specific bounty period as we did last time," said Zerodium founder Chaouki Bekrar to Kaspersky Labs.
This new reward is triple of what it had offered for Apple's iOS 9, which was $1 million. Apple's own bounty program launched for the first time earlier this year offers researchers or hackers up to $200,000 for any exploits identified in iOS 10
Zerodium also upped its reward for remote jailbreaks of Android 7.x and 6.x OS, boosting it to $200,000. It has also increased rewards for flaws in other software like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Edge, and Safari.
Bounty programs are an accepted and legitimate way for companies to identify loopholes and security lapses that might have been missed by them but unearthed by hackers.
Zerodium is a security start up that deals in zero-day exploits and does what's called "bug brokering".
A zero-day exploit is a vulnerability that has not been identified so far. Selling of such bugs by exploit vendors like Zerodium is often frowned upon and controversial, but is useful for entities like the U.S. government which buys the bugs to understand how technological systems can be used to tap into gadgets of used suspected or confirmed anti-social elements.
Bekrar stated that most of its clients were governments as well as corporations from North America and other allied countries.
In August, Apple had to release an emergency iOS patch after three zero-day vulnerabilities named Trident were being sold by an Israeli company and was "being used by governments to spy on journalists and activists."
