No one likes buggy software, but certain bugs can now make you rich if you find them before anyone else.
That's thanks to Zerodium (an exploit broker), which is offering large sums of money through a bug bounty for zero-day (previously unknown) exploits, with the bounty topping out at $1.5 million (around £1.15 million/AU$2 million). But to grab that much cash you'll need to find a way to remotely jailbreak an iPhone running iOS 10.
Jailbreaking your iPhone opens it up to apps and features that aren't officially offered by Apple, but it's never been quite this rewarding.
Bug bounties aren't new, in fact Apple itself offers payouts for vulnerabilities in its secure boot firmware components, but these top out at $200,000 (roughly £155,000/AU$260,000) and are only available to a select group of researchers.
Bounties for all
Zerodium's bug bounty is available to anyone, and the company is prepared to make multiple $1.5 million payments.
Finding Android bugs isn't quite as lucrative, but Zerodium will pay up to $200,000 for zero-day Android 7 exploits, according to a report by Wired.
Both its Android and iOS payouts are by far the highest they've ever been, with payments last year topping out at $100,000 (roughly £77,000/AU$130,000) for Android bugs and $1 million (around £770,000/AU$1.3 million) for iOS ones.
The increased prices on both platforms reflect the increased security offered by iOS 10 and Android Nougat, so the good news is our phones should be becoming less vulnerable to exploits. The bad news is that there's clearly a huge market for them still, and anyone with the skills to find them could become very rich indeed.
