14-year-old who found Apple FaceTime flaw eligible for bug bounty program

To provide some perspective, the profit of Apple in 2018 was $59.53 billion. Aramco's profits are also more than the profit of JP Morgan Chase, Alphabet, Facebook and Exxon Mobil combined.

Remember the news of Apple’s FaceTime bug that let users listen to conversations on the other side even before the video call was accepted? A 14-year-old from Arizona, USA discovered the flaw while he was playing PUBG with his friends. A report by CNBC reveals that an Apple representative got in touch with the boy and cited that he might be eligible for the bounty program.

Before the news of the bug got viral, Grant Thompson and his mother applied for a developer account and filed a Radar bug report. Apple then took down the FaceTime servers and said an update would be coming in a few days to fix the bug. Thompson, speaking to CNBC, stated that he was surprised as Apple could not discover this problem themselves.

Thompson’s mother, Michele said that in spite of trying to contact the Cupertino-based com many several times via emails and fax, Apple did not choose to take any action against the exploit until media reports broke out. She said that the Apple representative flew to Tucson, Arizona on February 1 to meet her son. The representative thanked Grant for informing and even asked for any feedback on how can the company improve their feedback process. 

The bigger news from the meeting was that the representative informed the Thompsons that Grant would be eligible for the bug bounty problem and the security team would get in touch with the family. Michele told the channel that if her son gets the bug bounty, the amount would be used for Grant’s college. 

In spite of negligence shown by Apple initially, Thompson said he would continue using Apple products. He believes bugs and exploits keep coming up and company’s like Apple do take such privacy issues seriously. 

The FaceTime bug was discovered at a time when the company’s CEO Tim Cook boasted of Apple being the market leader in providing and maintaining user privacy. The company in their apology note thanked the Thompson family for reporting the bug.