FaceTime bug teenager is eligible for bug bounty payout

The rather serious FaceTime bug widely reported about last week left Apple a little red-faced and one 14-year-old (and his mother) hoping Apple would give him some credit for discovering it. Now it looks like he’s going to get a big payout from Apple’s bug bounty program.

Grant Thompson is the teenager who discovered the bug 10 days before it went public. His mother, Michelle Thompson, set about telling Apple, which resulted in signing up as an Apple developer and submitting a bug report. The report wasn’t taken seriously for some reason, and it wasn’t until his mother shared the communications with Apple via Twitter that news of the bug went viral.

Since then, a “high-level Apple executive” has visited the family in Tucson, Arizona to thank them for reporting the bug and to ask how the reporting process could be improved. A thank you to the Thompson family was also included in a statement from Apple apologizing for the flaw, but that looked to be the end of it.

Since then, CNBC reported that when the executive visited the Thompson family he also told them Grant was eligible for a bug bounty for discovering the flaw. Michele Thompson explained, “They also indicated that Grant would be eligible for the bug bounty program. And we would hear from their security team the following week in terms of what that meant … If he got some kind of bug bounty for what he found, we’d certainly put it to good use for his college because I think he’s going to go far, hopefully.”

A bug bounty payout would most certainly help pay for college. Apple’s bug bounty program launched in 2016 with details appearing at the Black Hat conference. As revealed in a tweet by PCMag’s Neil Rubenking at the time, the payouts Apple offers start at $25,000 and increase up to $200,000 dependent on how serious the bug is. Even if Grant got the minimum payout it would probably feel like Christmas.

I’d be very surprised if a box full of the latest Apple hardware, software, and a developer license isn’t on its way over to Grant this week as well. It’s the least Apple can do.

This article originally published at PCMag
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