Apple Will Pay $1.5M And Give iPhones To Hackers Who Can Find Vulnerabilities

Apple reportedly offered bug bounty to hackers who will be able to find the vulnerability and report it to the tech giant.

On Thursday, Apple announced that it is offering an increase in the bug bounty for those who will succeed in their search for the operating system vulnerability in iPhones, iPads, and Mac. The company distributed hacker-friendly iPhones to their favorite researchers so that they can go and try to hack the devices at the lightest approach possible. This ensures that hacking will be harder for everyone else.

Ivan Krstić, Apple's head of security engineering and architecture revealed that in Apple’s quest to minimize if not completely eliminate the hacking and jailbreaking, the company has increased the incentives that hacker will get. Krstić called it as the bug bounty revamping.

A $100,000 reward will be given to a hacker who can expose an attack that bypasses an iPhone's lock screen, this category is also known as the physical access attack. A $1 million reward will be at stake for researchers who will discover a more severe attack that leads to gaining total, persistent control of a user's computer. This kind of attack succeeds even without the involvement of the user.

Apple will reward a researcher who will be able to identify the vulnerability as early as in the beta stage. This falls under the category of an early single attack method and it prevents the exploit to do further harm as it is detected and taken care of before the wider audience release. Such a category receives an additional 50 percent bonus that brings the reward to up to $1.5 million.

Apple also extends the bounties to everyone, invited or not. This is good news to those who wanted to be part of this task and was locked out because the bounties were limited only to invites in the past.

Apple’s extension does not only apply to the reward amount and the researchers invited. The scope of the operating system included in the list is also one point of concentration. From concentrating only on iOS, the quest is now also open for macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.