Zero day broker firm Zerodium has tripled iOS exploit bounty to $1.5M

The notorious zero-day broker company Zerodium has raised the value for a remote IOS jailbreak that reached $1.5 million.

The popular zero-day broker Zerodium, which is specialized in Buys and Sells zero-day exploits, has tripled the bug bounty for a remote iOS 10 exploit. The company is willing to pay a jailbreak vulnerability to US$1.5 million.

Zerodium first offered a bug bounty of US$500,000 for remote iOS 9 jailbreaks, the company then rewarded US$1 million to a group of hackers for disclosing a iOS zero-day vulnerability that could allow an attacker to remotely hack any Phone.

Last offer demonstrates the intent of the company to attract bug hunters to develop remote iOS jailbreaks. Of course behind the decision of the firm, there is a significant increase in the demand for zero-day exploits for both Apple and Android mobile platforms as confirmed by the Zerodium CEO Chaouki Bekrar.

Zerodium also announced to have doubled rewards for remote rooting flaws on the most recent Android versions, Marshmallow and Nougat, the company is willing to pay US$200,000.

Below the payout table disclosed by the Zerodium firm.

 

Zero-day exploits are valuable commodities in the hacking underground, several governments have dedicated cyber units to the discovery and exploitation of unknown vulnerabilities, but in some cases, they are sold by private entities in the criminal underground.

The rewards offered by the zero-day brokers are greater than the payouts of the vendors of the vulnerable products.

In the case of Apple for example, the awards are lower than Zerodium, bug hunters can earn up to $200,000 for a critical vulnerability affecting the secure boot firmware components, up to $100,000 for a flaw that could be exploit to extract sensitive data protected by the Secure Enclave, up to $50,000 for arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges and unauthorized access to iCloud account data, and up to $25,000 for access from a sandboxed process to user data outside the sandbox.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – bug bounty program, Hacking)