While Facebook is busy suing its hackers, Apple is busy hiring them according to iPhoneBloggers.co.uk. Nicholas Allegra (Comex), the man behind the very successful jailbreaking software JailbreakMe is taking a break from hacking, well at least doing it for free. Even though his app has earned his more than $50,000 in donations over the past year, he’s been doing it not just for fun but mainly to get a job.
Apple have a policy of employing hackers, well at least they’re working on one. Earlier this year they hired Peter Hajas, then enemy of the Apple state and now part of the Apple family. It seems Apple realise that regardless of how annoying it will be having to patch a new security bug every few days, they would be better off having Allegra working for them rather than against them. Allegra will now join the company as an intern seeking out vulnerabilities so that Apple can fix them.
According to Allegra, hacking – or at least looking for vulnerabilities – is like “editing an English paper…You just go through and look for errors.”
Graham Cluley of technology firm Sophos said that although Allegra had given Apple “plenty of headaches” over the past few months, exposing security weaknesses, it meant they were able to patch any problems before those with malicious code and more importantly, malicious intent, found out about it.