hackers ids article
TRANSCRIPT
Calling All Hackers! By Sara Kate Nash
The new iPhone has arrived, along with it’s new technology-‐a fingerprint sensor to unlock it. With it comes a contest for all the hackers in the world, to try to figure out how to steal someone’s fingerprint and break in to the phone. “It started out as a joke, I believed it wouldn’t be too trivial to hack, so instead of arguing with my friends about it I threw money at the problem, essentially put up or shut up,” said Nick DePetrillo, creator of the contest. He offered $100 to anyone who could hack the phone and send in the video, but now there are “a lot of people” involved, along with “a lot of money, over $15,000” said Nick. Arturus Rosenbacher works for a company called the Adventure Capital Corporation that has offered $10,000 to the person that figures out how to hack the technology first. Once the phone is hacked, they plan to “give the message back to Apple in minutes, so that it can’t be done again, our main concern is a malicious hacker trying to do the same thing, so we are taking it upon ourselves to try to figure it out. If hackers can’t do it, it’s pretty close to impossible,” said Rosenbacher. So although it started as a joke according to Nick, it has be come a nationwide ordeal. The phone just came out on Friday morning, but as of Sunday night at 9:00 there were already three submissions/solutions. Nick didn’t even have the time to try to hack the phone, “I can’t believe how fast people did it,” he said. DePetrillo said he was too busy with work as a Security Researcher in Silicon Valley, and interviews, “I have been doing interviews all day, tomorrow (Monday) someone will be declared a winner and I’ll have to do a million interviews again.” It is amazing how quickly these hackers have figured it out. It is not an easy task to hack a fingerprint sensor on a phone, “you have to have access to the iPhone 5S, and you have to have certain technology to do it,” said Rosenbacher. However, Rosenbacher has faith in the very capable hackers. DePetrillo, on the other hand, thought it would be a little more difficult than all his friends thought. Although this contest started as a joke, according to Rosenbacher’s company, it is now a quest to save people from getting their phones hacked. “If we can figure it out before some malicious hacker, we can save Apple a lot of time and money, and also people from being hacked,” he said. Rosenbacher also stated that, at least for him, it’s not about the money anymore, it’s about doing something to help everyone. DePetrillo said that although he created the contest, all the hackers and pledges have taken it into their own hands. DePetrillo created the website istouchidhackedyet.com that has all of the people who have pledged money and how much, but other than that “I haven’t had to do very much at all.”