Apple Announces Bug-Bounty Program

For those who programmers who want to make some serious cash, Apple is willing to pay you to find bugs in their software.

One of the biggest fears of a tech company like Apple is getting hacked and having millions of users’ private information stolen. Now, the tech giant is encouraging the public to try and find bugs with their software for some surprisingly massive rewards.

On Thursday, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture Ivan Kristic announced that the company will begin offering bounties to programmers and researchers who are able to discover any vulnerabilities in Apple products. The cash rewards will be as high as $200,000, which is a huge payday for anyone interested in trying to find weaknesses in the Apple universe.

The bounty program will be open to the those who have previously revealed vulnerabilities to Apple in September, and according to TechCrunch, these are the five categories that will get payouts to start:

• Vulnerabilities in secure boot firmware components: Up to $200,000
• Vulnerabilities that allow extraction of confidential material from Secure Enclave: Up to $100,000
• Executions of arbitrary or malicious code with kernel privileges: Up to $50,000
• Access to iCloud account data on Apple servers: Up to $50,000
• Access from a sandboxed process to user data outside the sandbox: Up to $25,000

In order to receive the reward, the person will need to provide proof-of-concept with the iOS and hardware.

For most people, this kind of stuff will be way over our heads. However, for people like hackers, cryptographers, programmers and researches, this is a great opportunity to make some serious cash.