Apple unveiled its mobile operating system, iOS 10, during WWDC 2016. (Photo : YouTube/EverythingApplePro)
Will Pangu, iH8sn0w, TaiG or any other hacking entity take the bite as a big bounty is now up for a successful remote jailbreak? A cold $1.5 million cash reward awaits jailbreak creators and the firm offering the money is willing to pay for multiple JB tools, a new report said.
It remains unclear if Zerodium's half-million payment for an iOS 9 jailbreak in 2015 was instrumental in the eventual release of Pangu's jailbreak tool but it appears that the company wants a repeat of that successful venture. Wired reported that Zerodium founder Chaouki Bekrar is looking to get numerous jailbreaks with the money lure.
"We hope to receive multiple submissions for the iOS bounty, as we can afford to buy many of them for $1.5M each," Wired reported Bekrar as saying.
With the huge sum to motivate independent developers to crack open not only the iPhone 7 but also the software that will run all iOS devices, Zerodium also acknowledged that Apple has made it a lot harder to tinker with iOS 10 and identify potential vulnerabilities to pave the way for a full-working jailbreak.
"We've increased the price due to the increased security for ... iOS 10," Bekrar said.
The statement aligns with the recent admissions from both Cydia creator Saurik and Luca Todesco that the latest iOS version is the most secured mobile OS deployed by Apple to date. The devs hinted that a jailbreak release is taking longer than usual no thanks to the security features packed with iOS 10.
However, with the promise of a windfall on the horizon things could speed up a bit for the jailbreak community. And even before the Zerodium cash rewards, hopes are high that Pangu will soon make its ongoing jailbreak work public. In recent months, the Chinese hacking team has showcased that iOS 10 can indeed be jailbroken and the proof was the successful installation of Cydia on the same OS.
Too, Todesco demoed an iPhone 7 running on an iOS 10 jailbreak but the Italian dev also made clear that his experiments were far from complete. The last heard from him was a plan to deliver the next jailbreak using exploits he claimed were present on the Safari mobile browser.
Jailbreak fans, however, are not too optimistic that Todesco will ever finalize an iOS 10 jailbreak. Saurik or Jay Freeman has indicated that the most likely source of the next untethered is Team Pangu. But with the $1.5 million bounty thrown in by Zerodium, which Wired said far exceeds that of Apple's $200,000 similar reward program, anything can happen real quick - pointing to an imminent iOS 10 jailbreak release.
