Black market for US$1 million iPhone hacks 'fascinating' says Apple
Costly hacks the result of 'a decade of our best work in protecting our users' says Apple's security engineering and architecture chief
The U.S. government paid a steep price to hackers to help it break into an iPhone used by a terrorist earlier this year.
The most recent credible report pegs the price the government paid at "under US$1 million," but comments by FBI director James Comey peg the price as being at least US$1.3 million.
And now, we know what a top Apple security engineer thinks about the black market for iPhone hacks.
Ivan Krstić, head of security engineering and architecture for Apple, addressed the secondary market for iPhone "vulnerabilities" (or, "zero-days," as security insiders call them) in a talk given at Apple's annual conference last week about how Apple sees security as a design philosophy.
It's difficult to measure security performance with objective statistics, Krstić explains, so he uses "indirect metrics" to evaluate how well Apple's security team is doing.
One of those metrics is the black market prices for iPhone hacks.