[Ecks]

Last year, Apple launched a long-awaited bug bounty program to reward friendly hackers who report flaws in the iPhone to the company. Despite inviting some of the best hackers in the world to join, it's a bit of a flop so far. The iPhone's security is so tight that it's hard to find any flaws at all, which leads to sky-high prices for bugs on the grey market. Researchers I spoke to are reluctant to report bugs both because they are so valuable and because reporting some bugs may actually prevent them from doing more research. "People can get more cash if they sell their bugs to others," said Nikias Bassen, a security researcher for the company Zimperium, and who joined Apple's program last year. "If you're just doing it for the money, you're not going to give [bugs] to Apple directly." Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker who now specializes in MacOS research and was invited to the Apple bug bounty program, agreed. He said that iOS bugs are "too valuable to report to Apple."

Read More @ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/artic...t-to-apple

[zorrophreak]

Yeah, this is something that prevents many bugs from going public. You can get a FUCKton from selling them to grey buyers, whereas the Apple Bug Bounty is likely to give a lower payout.

[Blink]

iOS vulnerabilities do seem to be of value, so I could see why this would fail. Mac ones are a little less, but non-Windoze OS zero days in general can go for pretty high depending on what you can do with them.