In the coming month of September, the tech giant Apple is launching a bug bounty program, which will pay anyone who can find the vulnerabilities in Apple’s operating system, along with its applications and iCloud.
The company gave this good news at the BlackHat hackers conference that was held at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. It went on from 30th July to the 4th of August. Ivan Krstic, who is the head of security for Apple, announced this, adding that this program is the first of its kind for Apple.
However, according to Krstic, this unique hacking program from Apple will start with a handful of pre-selected people on board; and starts the bounty from as low as $25,000 for finding vulnerabilities in a sandbox partition, going up to $200,000 for finding flaws in iOS devices. With the bounty price set, Apple – a trendsetter – as it has always been, will give other companies the competition on the importance of security and the white hat hacking market.
Furthermore, Apple, in the current market for bug bounty, is paying the most and is setting the value for hackers. According to Rich Mogul, who is the CEO, as well as an analyst from Securosis, said that if these bugs are to be sold to the government, they would happily buy them for millions of dollars. One of the many reasons why Apple decided to go with a few selected people for the bug bounty program.
#Apple to start the bug bounty programhttps://t.co/FGC1kTmd4Q
— Anon.Dos (@anondos_) 20 August 2016
From next month, Apple wants hackers working its side with this bug bounty program, assisting the security researchers to improve applications – along with iOS – and many root causes that make Apple products vulnerable. And similar to Apple, Microsoft Windows, Google, Facebook and many other ball players are paying good amounts of money.
Ben Bajarin, who is the head analyst of Creative Strategies marketing firm, states that it’s not the first time Apple is obtaining help from outsiders in the field of security, but in past years, Apple has cried out for help to many security firms, reaching global minds to help Apple gear up its security as a main objective for Apple research.
Without a doubt, bug bounty programs is an open-minded approach for businesses to pump up their security systems and improve their relationships with hackers and researchers, as a whole.
With that said, there are many organizations paying good amounts of money for hacking their security systems. Previously, 3 German students found a PHP flaw in PornHub’s website, which saw them rewarded with $22,000. However, the payout also depends upon the hacker’s profile, how many times have they been rewarded with the bounty money, how many successful tasks they have completed, how many companies have awarded them in their hall of fame, etc.
As we all know, Apple, in recent months, fought for the privacy of its customers and its iPhone product, after the FBI wanted access to a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. However, this tough battle against the government may have sparked the bug bounty program, hinting that Apple’s employees are finding it difficult to fish out vulnerabilities.
According to security experts, Apple products are very secure end units, and this is going to make the bug finding program extremely difficult.
Source: Tech Crunch
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