“Apple iOS, like all operating systems, is often affected by critical security vulnerabilities, however due to the increasing number of security improvements and the effectiveness of exploit mitigations in place, Apple’s iOS is now the most secure mobile OS”, Zerodium states on its website. However, in this case, Apple won’t get to see how the $1 million-winning team found their way into an iPhone remotely.
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KitGuru Says: This is a bit of a controversial one as Zerodium has essentially spent a hefty amount of cash to develop an exploit that would allow them to remotely take over iOS 9.1 devices and install any app they wanted.
The good news is that it’s still possible that Pangu or another jailbreak dev team will release an iOS 9.1 jailbreak as soon as they discover an exploit of their own, and the current exploit proves that iOS 9.1 can be jailbroken, so it’s really just a matter of time before a good iOS 9.1 jailbreak is released to the public.
Bekrar also told the publication that towards the end of last month, two teams were close to finding an exploit, but were “stuck” on the same issue.
“Making the jailbreak remotely triggerable via Safari or Chrome requires at least two to three additional exploits compared to a local jailbreak”, Zerodium explained in a message to Motherboard. And the most important thing is that they sell the new exploits to its customers, which include major technology, finance, and defense corporations, along with government agencies. That team developed a partial jailbreak and may be eligible for partial reward, he said. They had to find a series of “zero-day exploits” to jailbreak the Apple device.
According to the firm, the team that won the bounty had entered the competition just hours before the October 31 deadline.
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Zerodium required participants to remotely exploit iOS 9.1/iOS 9.2b using Safari, Chrome, a text message, or a multimedia message. While Apple announced earlier that any iPhone after the iPhone 5s will not be vulnerable to jailbreak, Zerodium has proven otherwise. Since it will be selling the jailbreak to “likely” the American customers only, Zerodium won’t immediately report vulnerabilities in iOS 9 to Apple.
