“A 19-year-old who was the first to jailbreak an iPhone 7. A former teenage prodigy turned world-renowned iOS hacker. An ex-NSA staffer who has repeatedly found Mac OS X security lacking,” Thomas Fox-Brewster reports for Forbes. “Todesco, Nicholas Allegra and Patrick Wardle are just some of the hackers rocking up to Cupertino today for a briefing with Apple, Forbes has learned. The meeting has been kept under wraps by Apple, which asked participants to keep the event confidential.”
“Apple plans to brief them on the imminent launch of its bug bounty program – in which they will be rewarded with up to $200,000 for providing the tech titan with information on vulnerabilities across the firm’s laptops and phones,” Fox-Brewster reports. “The program is expected to go live before the month is out, as promised at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this August. Unlike many other bug bounty initiatives, Apple chose to limit those who can take part to an invite-only list. That way, it can get more quality over quantity, but may miss out on some valuable contributions from those excluded.”
“One source, who asked to remain anonymous, claimed Apple had gone through the list of researchers who’d previously submitted vulnerability reports to handpick the first bounty participants,” Fox-Brewster reports. “The current invite list ‘is not too big at all’ as Apple wanted to ‘focus on getting actionable information’ rather than have to cope with a barrage of reports.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Things are about to get even more secure around here!
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s new bug bounty program offers some of the highest rewards in history – August 5, 2016
Security firm puts $1 million bug bounty on iOS 9 – September 21, 2015
I’m all for cutting the budgets of Apple’s political bias and increasing spending on security.