Apple is no stranger to offering rewards to users who find and exploit vulnerabilities in their system. The San Cupertino giant has announced its ‘bug bounty’ program for iOS, macOS, tvOS and more. Hackers and researchers who are actually able to find bugs and issues with the various operating systems and report them to Apple will receive a substantial reward for their efforts. The reward will depend on the severity of the exploit. The entire list of all the categories of bugs and issues are available for users to go through on Apple’s developer page.
Some of the categories include ‘Unauthorized access to iCloud account data on Apple Servers’ as well as ‘Zero-click kernel code execution with persistence and kernel PAC bypass’. The payout will range from $100,000 to a whopping 1 million dollars. That’s a lot of money and there are sure to be a bunch of hackers and researchers vying for the prize.
Just earlier in 2019, Apple embraced the hacker culture and unveiled the iOS Security Research Device Program at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Hackers and research experts were offered special iPhones for them to crack and find any sort of flaws on.
Here is what Apple has to say about the program. “The goal of the Apple Security Bounty is to protect customers through understanding both vulnerabilities and their exploitation techniques. Reports that include a basic proof of concept instead of a working exploit are eligible to receive no more than 50% of the maximum payout amount. Reports lacking necessary information to enable Apple to efficiently reproduce the issue will result in a significantly reduced bounty payment, if accepted at all.”