Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

samcurry.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 318 posts

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#11

Post by yokaze »

possiblelion wrote: post #9
blakesterz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Makes me wonder, if these guys could do it, how many Chinese industrial espionage units have? And Russia, and Iran, and so on... It seems safe to assume someone else out there found at least one of these and got in to the Apple internal network and has been quietly doing their job, whatever it may be.

"Our proof of concept for this report was demonstrating we could read and access Apple’s internal maven repository which contained the source code for what appeared to be hundreds of different applications, iOS, and macOS." This itself is massive. How many 0-days could emerge from something like that?!

Great, hard-shell/soft-centre.

If anyone asks, why you should go to all the effort to secure the software in your internal-network, that's why.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#12

Post by w1ntermute »

dsr_ wrote: post #3

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three. Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions. I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

If they actually did get paid so little, why did they do it? This seems like a terrible use of their time.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#13

Post by TaupeRanger »

_the_inflator wrote: post #6

Nice read, like Forensic Files for hackers. However I am stunned that they did not earn past 6 figures. I was a bit primed with the $100.000 bug earnings.

I thought the same thing. I guarantee foreign agents trying to hack into Apple systems are being paid much more than these "nice guys". The incentives here don't seem up to par.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#14

Post by atom-morgan »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
dsr_ wrote: post #3

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three. Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions. I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

If they actually did get paid so little, why did they do it? This seems like a terrible use of their time.

Many people undervalue their services.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#15

Post by culturestate »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
dsr_ wrote: post #3

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three. Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions. I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

If they actually did get paid so little, why did they do it? This seems like a terrible use of their time.

I'd wager they'll make substantially more money from the long tail of this blog post than from the bounties.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#16

Post by Traster »

dsr_ wrote: post #3

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three. Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions. I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

It now says:

>Between the period of July 6th to October 6th

They may have corrected it. Whilst $52k is cheap for 15 months of labour, that's as of October 4th. So it's not unreasonable for that number to go up significantly over time. It'll be interesting to see what their final total is.

I don't know what Apple would value 15 months of highly skilled security consultants at, but I can't imagine it'd be below $200k, so Apple is likely still getting a good deal even if they pay out a lot more.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#17

Post by bredren »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
dsr_ wrote: post #3

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three. Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions. I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

If they actually did get paid so little, why did they do it? This seems like a terrible use of their time.

He does use the word fun twice in the opening.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#19

Post by trollied »

dsr_ wrote: post #3

July 6 - August 6 - September 6 -- that's 2 months elapsed, not three. Five people working for 2 months is 10 person-months. Apple paid them just under $52,000, none of which was guaranteed. They had to pay whatever taxes are appropriate for their jurisdictions. I'd say Apple got an amazing bargain.

They've only paid out on a small number of the reports so far though. There's time for more $ to roll in.

Re: We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

#20

Post by bsenftner »

If Apple does not pay these guys several hundred thousand dollars per person, they just recruited the worlds best hackers to work against them. Pay them, and the situation is reversed. Now we see how smart Apple really is.
Post reply on HN