Hackers Pool Together A Reward For First To Hack iPhone's Fingerprint Reader

For hackers, the iPhone 5s’s Friday release marks the start of a race to crack its new fingerprint reader. Now a few dozen of them are raising the stakes.

On Wednesday afternoon security researcher Nick Depetrillo and Robert David Graham launched IsTouchIDHackedYet.com, a website designed to crowdfund a reward for the first person to demonstrate in a video that he or she can lift a fingerprint from any surface, reproduce the print, and use it to unlock the owner of that fingerprint’s iPhone 5s. As of Wednesday night, the total bounty had already risen to close to $2,500, along with nearly $500 worth of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and sundry extras including a bottle of tequila, a lockpicking tool, and a “dirty sex book.”

 Depetrillo announced on Twitter that he’d give $100 to the first person to prove him wrong, and Graham created the IsTouchIDHackedYet site, as first noted by Cnet. “I put my money where my mouth is and it really took off,” Depetrillo says. Anyone can informally add their own pledge by tweeting it with the hashtag #istouchidhackedyet. The pool so far seems to be based on an honor system, though Depetrillo is noting the pledges and says he’ll “track any deadbeats.”

While companies like Facebook, Google, and most recently Microsoft all shell out thousands of dollars in rewards to hackers who report security flaws in their products, Apple has never offered such “bug bounties.” But any well-connected hacker who does crack TouchID may be able to sell their work for more than a few thousand dollars and a dirty paperback. Some government agencies pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about previously unknown vulnerabilities in software and hardware. A single exploit that can allow an attacker to remotely gain full control of an iPhone, for instance, can sell for as much as $250,000.

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