jailbreaken

Most tech companies have a way to thanking those that find holes in their software. Twitter has paid over $322,000 in bounties over the past two years. As always for better or worse Apple who always “Thinks Different” did not. That’s not to say there were not holes to be patched. Seems there is a jailbreak every few months. Apple’s head of Security Engineering and Architecture Ivan Krstic announced at Black Hat that his company will now offer cash bounties of up to $200,000 for hackers and researchers who find and report security flaws in Apple products. $200,000 might sound like a lot of money for a bug but it’s really not. Remember the FBI reportedly paid hackers $1 million the to break into an iPhone owned by one of the shooters involved in the San Bernardino incident last year.

Apple said the reason they are doing this is because its own internal testers are having difficulty finding more bugs. Before any security analyst start jumping for joy, Here are some facts that you might want to know before going all Mr. Robot on Apple products. Apple is currently only working with a select list of researchers. They do say that if someone outside the group finds a bug, they can be included in the program. That said I think that Apple’s $200,000 bug bounty program is the end of jailbreaks as we know them. Why would one release a jailbreak for free when you can have Apple pay you for it?