Here’s a nice side hustle for college student Ryan Pickren.  The brainiac cyber security student took part in Apple’s bug bounty program and cashed in big. 

He got Apple to cut him a check for $100,500, thanks to his discovery of a webcam hack Tim Cook and company didn’t know existed. 

Pickren discovered that the webcam vulnerability considered a series of issues with Safari and iCloud.  Before he saved the day and brought it to Palo Alto’s attention, devices could be attacked by malicious websites exploiting these flaws. 

In his report, the student explained the vulnerability would give a hacked full access to all web-based accounts, concluding iCloud, PayPal, you name it.  Plus, it would allow full permission to use the camera, microphone, and screen sharing. An intelligent hacker could gain full access to a device’s files by exploiting Safari’s “web archive” files. 

No word if any bad actors exploited that bug because Apple is sharing that info, but they did pay over $100K to the student and took this pretty seriously. 

Add comment