IOS 9 Jailbreak: China’s Hacker Group ‘Keen Team’ Already In Process, Plans To Release It After iOS 9 Launch

It has only been three days since Apple unveiled iOS 9, followed by the release of the first beta version of the upcoming mobile operating system. But a group of iOS hackers in China is already working on an iOS 9 jailbreak, which it plans to release in the second half of this year, according to a report by Forbes.

According to Liang Chen, one of the members of the group called “Keen Team,” the hackers are currently digging into the newly released iOS 9 beta, and may even take the assistance of the well-known Pangu Team, another group of Chinese iOS hackers, who had released jailbreak tools for iOS 7 and iOS 8.

“We want to release it just after iOS 9, that’s our plan,” Chen told Forbes. “It depends how lucky we are.”

Chen said that the Keen Team, also spelled K33n Team, is not planning to work with TaiG, another Chinese hacker group, which was responsible for the most recent untethered jailbreak for iOS 8.1. However, Chen did not say why Keen Team prefers Pangu over TaiG.

Chen and his team’s pledge to release an iOS 9 jailbreak is good news for jailbreak users who are hoping to update their devices to iOS 9 this fall. But creating a new jailbreak will not be an easy task for the group, thanks to the new “rootless” security feature rumored to be included in iOS 9.

Although Apple did not talk about this feature during its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, several prominent iOS hackers have found it in the first OS X El Capitan beta. Some remnants of it have also been detected in the iOS 9 beta, iDownloadBlog reported, adding that the feature is expected to make jailbreaking more difficult than ever.

However, Keen Team is apparently up for the challenge. The group has been previously rewarded a total of $67,500 in Mobile Pwn2Own competitions in 2013 and 2014 for exploiting iPhones and breaking into Apple’s Safari browser, Forbes reported.