At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris on Friday, Apple VP of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić revealed a new maximum payout of $2 million for a chain of software exploits vulnerable to spyware abuse.
In addition to individual payouts, the company’s bug bounty also includes a bonus structure, adding additional awards for exploits that can bypass its extra secure Lockdown Mode as well as those discovered while Apple software is still in its beta testing phase. Taken together, the maximum award for what would otherwise be a potentially catastrophic exploit chain will now be $5 million. The changes take effect next month.
“We are lining up to pay many millions of dollars here, and there’s a reason,” Krstić tells WIRED. “We want to make sure that for the hardest categories, the hardest problems, the things that most closely mirror the kinds of attacks that we see with mercenary spyware — that the researchers who have those skills and abilities and put in that effort and time can get a tremendous reward.”
Apple says that there are more than 2.35 billion of its devices active around the world. The company’s bug bounty was originally an invite-only program for prominent researchers, but since opening to the public in 2020, Apple says that it has awarded more than $35 million to more than 800 security researchers. Top-dollar payouts are very rare, but Krstić says that the company has made multiple $500,000 payouts in recent years.
“You can say, well, that seems like a very large effort to protect only that very small number of users that are being targeted by mercenary spyware, but there is just this incontrovertible track record described by journalists, tech companies, and civil society organizations that these technologies are constantly being abused,” Krstić says. “And we feel a great moral obligation to defend those users. Despite the fact that the vast majority of our users will never be targeted by anything like this, this work that we did will end up increasing protection for everyone.”
MacDailyNews Take: Have at it, bug busters!
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