Apple Sends Jailbroken iPhones to Researchers to Find Vulnerabilities

Speaking to Business Insider , Spanish security researcher Gergely Kalman said that the jailbroken device would allow experts to run arbitrary code to search for vulnerabilities and bugs. Apple previously offered a $1 million bounty for bug finders in 2019, and announced that it would soon send "special" versions of the iPhone to security researchers.

Apple's efforts to prevent potential exploits come as hackers continue to exploit them. Just last December, Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky discovered one of the "most sophisticated" zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS. This allowed hackers to exploit Apple's iMessage file attachment feature to bypass iOS's hardware-based memory protections and gain full control of the device. Notably, hackers could gain access and steal sensitive data without the user ever having to open the flawed message.

Although Apple later patched the vulnerability, Kaspersky still criticized Apple because its devices are never truly secure in the context of increasingly evolving cyberattack methods.

The image posted by Kalman shows a jailbroken iPhone that would allow developers to investigate the system in a consumer-like state. Researchers would be able to add developer tools and platform privileges to the device through its subsystem. These particular iPhones have not yet gone through full production and are not widely available.

Jailbreaking an iPhone is the equivalent of rooting an Android device, which allows users to modify the phone's operating system. Non-developers should not root or jailbreak their phones as it can break the device's system in the process, even losing their Apple ID.