Apple has hired the man responsible for creating a website that allowed visitors to jailbreak their iPhones by simply clicking a link. The 19-year-old hacker, Nicholas Allegra (who goes by the alias "comex") announced via Twitter that Apple has hired him as an intern.
Allegra used a flaw in how iOS handled PDF files to create jailbreakme.com. The website made the process of jailbreaking an iPhone as easy as visiting his webpage. Apple quickly patched the flaw, but Allegra found other flaws to continue his jailbreaking work. The third version of the site used another PDF-handling flaw that could jailbreak other iOS devices including the iPad 2.
Allegra was outed by Forbes as a Brown University student earlier this month, has been involved in the iPhone-hacking scene for awhile. Last year he helped George "geohot" Hotz build a jailbreak tool called limera1n and co-developed a workaround for jailbroken iPhones that refused to load DRM-protected iBooks.
"It's been really, really fun, but it's also been a while and I've been getting bored," Allegra wrote on Twitter. "So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple."
Source: Ars Technica
Comments
Re: iPhone Jailbreaker Gets Apple Internship
This is what companies should do. Person X finds a major flaw in your product, hire person X so they can make a better product for you. This will net the company a better product and a better reputation as well.
Re: iPhone Jailbreaker Gets Apple Internship
Maybe I should hack their website. They might give me a job.
Re: iPhone Jailbreaker Gets Apple Internship
So, he routinely finds major flaws (perhaps even day 1 level issues) in apple's iOS, and they *only* give him an internship?
Re: iPhone Jailbreaker Gets Apple Internship
Still better than the lawsuit he would have gotten if this was Sony.