Somebody Just Claimed a $1M Bounty for Hacking the iPhone

They are kind enough to credit you by name on security updates.

They can do that by man-in-the-middling you while you browse away with Safari but other ways exist too.

Jailbreaks are essentially reliable exploits, so any "jailbreak" if tweaked would also be a good way of installing malware or an implant in NSA parlance. This is also not just one vulnerability it's several, a remote vuln to get on the phone, a sandbox escape, a info leak to calculate the ALSR slide and a kernel exploit. This is a considerable amount of work, I'm guessing a month or so of fuzzing and manual testing, and 2 months to develop the jailbreak/exploits.

Have a look at the Italian cybersecurity firm Hacking Team, they were routinely selling exploits or packages of exploits to governments around the world. There was no exclusivity agreement for these sales.

As for apple paying as others have mentioned they dont pay bug bounties and usually these vulnerabilities are found by people jailbreaking iPhones, they are usually released for free and at that stage apple can patch the vulnerability for their next software version.

I expect that this will be the end of free jailbreaks on apple products now, selling your exploit will become too valuable to release for free (at least remotely executable exploits will).

Also, who cares about the middle man? It's a MILLION dollars now. Today. Not maybe in 6 months, but now. Seems like a great way to earn a living as a geek, without getting too involved in the whole intelligence thing.

On the other hand, if you are Randian, then taking the bounty is the ONLY ethical thing you can do, as Apple explicitly does not pay bounties of any amount.

While I'm troping, I'll take this chance to say that Down with Microsoft, Google is a hypocrite for "Do No Evil" and Cult of Apple are idiots...

Welcome to modern journalism.

Look at the capabilities Snowden revealed, some of them read like SciFi and NSA had them close to a decade ago. Do you seriously believe the NSA and any other similarly well-funded actor _does not_ have multiple remote exploits for iOS and if they just fix this one, everything will be alright?

There are other actors, not quite top-of-the-pyramid-NSA level, that would gladly pay a million $ for this though, and this is where zerodium is selling.

Your only hope is to assume that everything can be compromised and if you have reason to fear said compromise (some would say do it even if you don't), come up with a plan that takes that into account (risk analysis, compartmentalization, segmentation, assumption of compromise).