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Hack iOS 10, Get $1.5 Million
Reader Trailrunner7 writes: The stakes in the vulnerability acquisition and bug bounty game have just gone up several notches, with a well-known security startup now offering $1.5 million for a remote jailbreak in iOS 10.The payout was put on the table Thursday by Zerodium, a company that buys vulnerabilities and exploits for high-value target platforms and applications. The company has a set of standing prices for the information it will buy, which includes bugs and exploits for iOS, Android, Flash, Windows, and the major browsers, and the top tier of that list has been $500,000 for an iOS jailbreak. But that all changed on Thursday when Zerodium announced that the company has tripled the standing price for iOS to $1.5 million.
Just give me the source code first! :)
that gov't intelligence services are putting up that money.
Spoiler alert: the bad guys will win, as buying exploits is the only way they can do their business, while apple still sells iphones when there is a super secret vulnerability that gets used three times and thats it. They don't really care and only do the bug bounty program for PR reasons. And you can make more money with breaking into stuff than with selling stuff. Just look at the recent heists where part of the attack was social engineering, part of it was to manufacture emails to look like coming from management. Having access to management iphones is really helping here.
If you sell to them, you're a weapon dealer of the shadier kind. You'll help oppressive regimes to jail dissidents.
I wonder who is funding this startup?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Is this proof of iOS's security or does this correlate with the value of the holders of the iPhones? I could see it either way or both.
The harder a platform is to crack, the higher the value of the exploit. But only if the users of that platform are valuable or there are economies of scale in play.
iPhone is certainly not the most widespread platform, so then it must be the value of the targets... right?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Given the FBI complaining about its encryption, this bug bounty, etc, the general impression (and yes, it might be wrong) is that the iOS platform is pretty secure.
So how secure is Apple in terms of physical security, employee security, etc?
You would think the next level of attack would be the HQ itself -- getting somebody inside, either secret agent style or compromising an Apple employee somehow.
Are people who work on iOS device security watched 24/7 by security themselves? Do they work in some kind of high security vault? Is the guy pushing the mail cart actually a deep cover FSB agent?
If you work for Apple on iOS security do you think twice when some pretty girl at the bar starts talking to you, especially if she says her name is Natasha?
obviously.
It doesn't even matter since they will share/steal from each other anyway.
You now have my attention; damn, where's my white hat?
> Given ... this bug bounty, etc, the general impression ... is that the iOS platform is pretty secure.
This bounty shows that iOS is *worth* more. If you pwn a $10 feature phone you'll get low-value targets. MS phone is worth less bc of low uptake. Android less bc versioning means lots of surface, and its distribution includes lots of cheaper, flakier, un-updade-able phones. iOS is rich people.
> people who work on iOS ... Natasha
early release of yet-unpatched vulns from internal compromise? That's a thing, sure.
Shouldn't this be illegal somehow? Can Apple can do anything to stop Zerodium from doing this? Or can Zerodium solicit for bugs in any system they want?
Vectors could be NSF, Bluetooth, WiFi, OTA, how about when you attach it to a compromised pc running iTunes? Take a backup file of the device and hit that remotely?