Apple is a company that has always touted privacy as one of the key selling point for its devices. If you have ever watched an Apple launch event, you might know how many times the Cupertino giant addresses its newest devices, be it iPhones, iPads, or Macs, as the most secure device ever. However, at a recent Hackathon competition, some Chinese white-hat hackers broke into Apple’s latest iPhone 13 Pro running iOS 15.0.2 in a mere second! It was an achievement, and for that, they bagged a $300,000 cash prize.
iPhone 13 Pro Hacked in 1 Second!
During the recent hacking championship in China known as Tiangfu Cup, not one but two hacking teams were able to break the iPhone 13 Pro in a matter of seconds. As per the competition’s official website, participating teams had to break into the iPhone 13 Pro to gain control of the phone while it ran on the latest iOS 15.0.2 version.
There were three tiers of rewards for hacking the iPhone 13 Pro. For remote code execution (RCE), the prize was $120,000, for RCE plus a sandbox escape, the reward was $180,000, and for the remote jailbreak of the device, the prize money was $300,000.
Amongst the two winning teams, Team Pangu, which is a popular name in the iPhone jailbreak community, was able to remotely jailbreak the iPhone 13 Pro in a record time of 1 second. It is not a joke and pretty surprising that the hacking group was able to get into the iPhone 13 Pro’s system, which Apple calls the most secure, so quickly and effortlessly. However, it is evident that the team has been preparing for the competition for a generous amount of time.
Another team from China’s Kunlun Lab was able to exploit a vulnerability in Safari for iOS 15 to get into the iPhone 13 Pro. The CEO of Kunlun Lab, who is also the former CTO of the internet security company Qihoo 360, broke into the device live in merely 15 seconds.
Both the teams won a big cash reward for their achievements. They are expected to contact Apple to inform them about the vulnerabilities, so the company could deploy a fix with a future update.
