Hacks

As  promised by Apple  in August this year, the company today finally opened its bug bounty program to all security researchers, offering monetary rewards to anyone for reporting vulnerabilities in the iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and iCloud to the company. Since its  launch  three years ago,  Apple's bug bounty program  was open only for selected security researchers based on invitation and was only rewarded for reporting vulnerabilities in the iOS mobile operating system. However, speaking at a hacking conference in August this year, Ivan Krstić, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple,  announced  the company's upcoming  extended bug bounty program  which included three main highlights: an enormous increase in the maximum reward from $200,000 to $1.5 million, accepting bug reports for all of its operating systems and latest hardware, opening the program for all researchers. Now starting from tod...

Besides rewarding ethical hackers from its pocket for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities in third-party open-source projects, Google today announced financial support for open source developers to help them arrange additional resources, prioritizing the security of their products. The initiative, called " Patch Rewards Program ," was launched nearly 6 years ago, under which Google rewards hackers for reporting severe flaws in many widely used open source software, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Linux kernel, Apache, Nginx, jQuery, and OpenVPN. So far, Google has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty to hackers across the world who helped improve the overall security of many crucial open source software and technologies that power the Internet, operating systems, and networks. The company has now also decided to motivate volunteer work done by the open source community by providing upfront financial help to project teams, using which they can acquire additiona...