Zerodium's $1 million bounty set for hacking the new iOS 9 has met its match. Last weekend, the start-up brand tweeted their congratulatory message with the hashtag #jailbreak.
Our iOS #0day bounty has expired & we have one winning team who made a remote browser-based iOS 9.1/9.2b #jailbreak (untethered). Congrats!
— Zerodium (@Zerodium) November 2, 2015
Many tried to win the challenge but were unsuccessful. It required a hacker to 'remotely jailbreak' an iPhone or iPad which operated on the then latest iOS version, i.e. iOS 9. Successfully circumventing iOS security lines, the hacker would have earned the privileges to install and use any app without any conditions whatsoever. So as per the terms of the challenge, the jail-break must come about either through a text, an MMS, Safari or Chrome, with the finding of a string of '0 day' bugs essential to the hack.
There was only one team that lived up to the challenge and made their successful jailbreak just hours before the end of the challenge.
This feat comes as a huge breakthrough since the last such hack was on iOS 7; wherein a bug known as 'CVE-2014-4377' made the iOS vulnerable to hackers.
Companies like Google and Facebook often hire ethical hackers to find shortcomings in their products so that these vulnerabilities can be managed. But others such as Zerodium here, offer larger bounties than these brands and keep the revelations a secret, only to disclose them to government arms such as the NSA.
We now know that Apple isn't entirely safeguarded against hacks. Three cheers for the winners who helped everyone realize this.
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