Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Apple finally expands its bug bounty program to accept MacOS bugs

Anita George
By

Apple’s 3-year-old bug bounty program has finally, officially expanded to accept bug submissions from other Apple ecosystem platforms, including MacOS. The technology company announced its plans for the expansion just a few months ago, during the Black Hat cybersecurity conference. Apple appears to have launched the expansion of its Security Bounty program on Thursday, December 19, via a new webpage published on its site that provides further details on the updated program.

The Apple Security Bounty program is essentially a program in which Apple incentivizes security researchers to find bugs in Apple’s various operating systems and report them to the company in exchange for a pretty sizable monetary reward. As ZDNet notes, when the program was first launched in 2016, it only accepted bug reports for iOS bugs from certain researchers who had been invited to participate in the program. But as of this week, the Security Bounty program has officially expanded to not only accept MacOS bugs, but also bugs from other Apple operating systems, and it now allows the participation of all security researchers.

Recommended Videos

The newly published webpage on Apple’s website provides details on the current iteration of the Security Bounty program, including eligibility guidelines, bounty categories (and their associated maximum rewards), and instructions on how to submit a bug report. There’s even a separate page that lists example payouts for different kinds of bugs.

Related

In addition to MacOS bugs, the program officially accepts bug reports for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and WatchOS. There doesn’t appear to be any MacOS specific-guidelines for submitting bug reports about it, but generally speaking, in order to be eligible for a bounty, researchers must follow three main guidelines:

  1. You have to be the first one to report the bug to Apple Product Security.
  2. A report must be submitted and it should be “clear” and contain “a working exploit.”
  3. You can’t publicize the bug until “Apple releases the security advisory for the report.”

It’s also worth noting that if the bug has “significant impact to users,” Apple will still take it into consideration for a bounty payment even if it doesn’t “fit the published bounty categories.” Also, the bounties themselves aren’t tiny. In fact, the smallest example payout listed was $25,000 and the largest payout appears to be $1 million.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Anita George
Anita George
Computing Writer
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
Apple quietly backtracks on the MacBook Air’s biggest issue
The MacBook Air on a white table.

The new MacBook Air with M3 chip not only allows you to use it with two external displays, but it has also reportedly addressed a storage problem that plagued the previous M2 model. The laptop now finally has much faster storage performance since Apple has switched back to using two 128GB NAND modules instead of a single 256GB module on the SSD drive.

This was discovered by the YouTuber Max Tech, who tore down the entry-level model of the MacBook Air M3 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. In his tests, thanks to the two NAND modules, the M3 MacBook Air is nearly double faster than the M2 MacBook Air. Blackmagic Disk Speed tests show that the older M2 model with the problematic NAND chip had a 1584.3 Mb/s write speed, and the newer M3 model had 2108.9 Mb/s for the M3 model, for a 33% difference. In read speeds, it was 1576.4 Mb/s on the old model and 2880.2 Mb/s on the newer model.

Read more
The 6 best ways Macs work with your other Apple devices
A person holds an iPhone in front of a MacBook.

One of the best things about using more than one Apple device is the way they interact with each other. Apple has built all kinds of clever features into its famous ecosystem, and it means your devices all work together in a way that you just don’t get from any other manufacturer.

AirDrop might be the ultimate expression of this, though that's fairly well-known. Here, we’ve picked out six other great ways your Mac works with other Apple products. Most require you to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled, as well as for you to be using the same Apple ID on all your devices. Check the System Settings app on your devices to make sure the specific features are enabled, although most should be by default.

Read more
I never knew I needed this mini Mac app, but now I can’t live without it
Apple MacBook Pro 16 downward view showing keyboard and speaker.

Switching apps is something I do countless times every day on my Mac, so much so that I don’t ever think anything of it. That is until recently, when I discovered a new app that has me flipping windows in a new (and much-improved) way.

That app is called Quick Tab, and it’s designed to make app switching a little more painless. Now, I’ll admit that I’ve never thought of the traditional Command-Tab key combination as all that painful, but Quick Tab has swiftly shown me what I’ve been missing.

Read more