Competition was announced in September.
By Raif Karerat
Security startup Zerodium announced that it has agreed to dole out a prize of $1 million to a team of hackers who have successfully developed a technique that can hack any iPhone or iPad that can be tricked into visiting a carefully crafted web site.
Founder of the company, Chaouki Bekrar, who is based in Washington D.C. and is known for discovering unknown or zero-day vulnerabilities, made the announcement Monday.
Zerodium had previously set the terms of a competition to see which white-hat hackers could hack Apples’ products for a seven-figure prize on Sept. 21.
The contest charged hackers with jailbreaking a device running iOS 9.1, which if done by real criminals, would theoretically afford them access to a multitude of features and personal information about users, as well as the ability to install malicious apps.
The participants had to accomplish their task via Safari, Chrome, or a text or multimedia message, meaning they had to find a chain of unknown bugs and work out a way of exploiting them.
The reward that the company offered shows how valuable the information could be to other companies, organizations and even nation states, according to Computer World.
“If they’re paying a million dollars, I’m sure that means someone is willing to buy it for that or more,” said Patrick Wardle, director of research with Synack — a service that matches security researchers with bug-hunting work — during an interview with CW.
Meanwhile, the second team that participated in the contest developed a partial jailbreak and may be eligible for partial reward, wrote Bekrar.