Yes, you read it right. Cyber security firm Zerodium is ready to pay a whopping million dollars to anyone who can hack Apple’s latest mobile & tablet operating system iOS 9.
Zerodium has announced that it is willing to shell out up to $US3 million to three individual hackers or three groups for a full “jailbreak” or exploits of iOS 9 on new generation Apple iPhone and iPads. Recently, apple release iOS9 along with iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPad Air 4 and iPad Pro.
Jailbreaking is the process of removing hardware restrictions imposed by iOS, Apple’s operating system, on devices running it (Analogous to rooting in Android). Zerodium, a subsidiary of French company Vapen, caught the attention of millions of hackers around the world, for whom it has listed some preconditions on its official website. The hackers have to notify previously unknown issues in order to be considered for Zerodium’s iOS 9 million dollar bounty.
Zerodium in an online statement mentioned Apple’s iOS as the most secure operating system in the market.
“But don’t be fooled. Secure does not mean unbreakable, it just means that iOS has currently the highest cost and complexity of vulnerability exploitation and here is where the million dollar iOS 9 bug bounty comes into play,” said in the online statement.
The security firm says it honor hackers and security experts for making new findings in the field of software vulnerabilities. Zerodium then examines the findings to aid its corporate clients and government agency to fill loopholes in their defenses.
“The strength of iOS is essentially based on layers of security that are individually vulnerable but extremely effective together. It is nevertheless to possible to attack each of these elements, which is a fairly long and costly process,” Zerodium boss told AFP in an interview.
It would be interesting to know how Apple would react to this sensational bounty on its product.
