With companies computer systems getting hacked more and more frequently, many are now turning to hackers to find their weaknesses to make it more difficult to hack. But one company offered an incredible amount of money to get them to find flaws in one operating system…
Apple devices are considered to be very secure and incredibly difficult to hack, but now someone has claimed they have hacked the new iPhone and could be set to win $1 million bounty – set up by new start-up Zerodium – in the process.
Our iOS #0day bounty has expired & we have one winning team who made a remote browser-based iOS 9.1/9.2b #jailbreak (untethered). Congrats!
— Zerodium (@Zerodium) November 2, 2015
Founder Chaouki Bekrar has said the prize was claimed over the weekend for the challenge which consisted of finding a way to remotely jailbreak a new iPhone or iPad running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system iOS 9.1 or 9.2b.
However, it wasn’t any easy challenge. The participant essentially had to find a series, or a chain of unknown zero-day bugs and in mid October, Bekrar told Motherboard that nobody had claimed the prize yet, with two separate teams ‘stuck’ on the same hurdle.
Finally, someone has found a way to jump it- just a few hours before the Zerodium bounty expired, managing to find a number of vulnerabilities and carry out a remote and untethered jailbreak.
The likes of Facebook and Google have launched similar programs over the years for hackers to find vulnerabilities and disclose them to get fixed, but the reward was nowhere near this seven-figure sum.
The identity of the winners and what they uncovered remains unknown, but Zerodium will now test the vulnerabilities to make sure the exploit chain ‘fully meets the bounty rules’.
John Lund/Blend Images/CorbisNot bad for a few weeks’ work…
