The author probably could not have gotten an internship with Apple. The one person I heard of Apple hiring like you explain was @comex, who worked on jailbreaks. By hiring @comex, they did 2 things:

1) Put an end to a jailbreaker's work 2) Hired someone to find security holes

While this is a pretty neat story, the author probably wouldn't be as valuable for Apple as someone like @comex would be.

Here is more information about that hire: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/26/apple-hires-iphone-hacker-n...