Zerodium, a premium exploit acquisition platform for high-end zero-days and advanced vulnerability research has published that it will pay $500,000 to anyone who can hack messaging apps including Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Viber, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Telegram.
The rewards have been increased after companies started end-to-end encryption in their applications, making it more complex for anyone to hack their messaging platforms. The company is now offering up to $500,000 for remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting popular messaging and email apps.
“ZERODIUM pays premium bounties and rewards to security researchers to acquire their original and previously unreported zero-day research affecting major operating systems, software, and devices. While the majority of existing bug bounty programs accept almost any kind of vulnerabilities and PoCs but pay very low rewards, at ZERODIUM we focus on high-risk vulnerabilities with fully functional exploits, and we pay the highest rewards on the market.”
The highest bounty offered by ZERODIUM is for Apple’s iOS devices with $1.5 million awarded to anyone who can perform a remote jailbreak of iOS devices without any user interaction and up to $1 million can be rewarded for the same exploit that requires some user interaction such as clicking on a malicious link or opening a malicious file).
