Apple Inc, which has been criticized in recent years for failing to pay outside hackers who report bugs in its products, on Thursday said that it would begin offering a bug bounty to technologists who alert the company to flaws.
At the Black Hat hacking conference, Apple announced a list of vulnerabilities that would command big bounties, including US$25,000 for ways around Apple’s digital compartments and into its customers’ data, US$50,000 for bugs that give hackers a way into iCloud data and US$200,000 to turn over critical vulnerabilities in Apple’s firmware — the software that lies closest to the bare metal of the machine.
The firm said that if hackers donated their rewards to charity, it would match their donation.
“We want to reward the people, and frankly the creativity it takes to find bugs in these categories,” said Ivan Krstic, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture.
Over the past six years, nearly every company in Silicon Valley has been rewarding hackers who turn over bugs — a term for flaws that can make a product vulnerable to intrusion — in their systems, with cash.
The hope is that the money will be an incentive to keep those flaws out of the hands of organized groups or spy agencies willing to pay big money to learn about them.
However, Apple had stayed away from the practice. Instead, it had credited anyone who turned over bugs by putting their names on its Web site — a far cry from the tens of thousands of dollars, and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars, companies like Google and Facebook Inc were willing to pay.
The lack of an Apple bug bounty program made headlines this year when the US FBI announced that it had paid hackers more than US$1 million for a back door into Apple’s iPhone.
The annual Black Hat conference, now in its 19th year, is a gathering place for all sorts of experts on computer security, including hackers, tech industry executives and government officials.
Dan Kaminsky, a respected security researcher, said in a keynote speech that the industry was falling far short of expectations.
“We made promises in technology, and people are starting not to believe them,” Kaminsky told the audience. “Everybody looks busy, but the house still burns.”
He argued for a cybersecurity equivalent of the US’ National Institutes of Health or a Manhattan Project to fund research.
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