Whilst smartphone owners in Western nations are content within the walled gardens of Apple and Google app stores for their games, media and work tools, the Chinese are fanatical about apps and want the broadest possible choice from non-Apple app stores. There are at least 362 million monthly active mobile app users in China, according to data provided by iResearch. Such big sums are on offer due to the explosion of the third-party app store industry in China. More often, sellers of iOS zero-day vulnerabilities - the previously-unknown and unpatched flaws required for jailbreaks - make thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chinese firms, private buyers or governments, in particular three-letter agencies from the US. “Many experts agree the price for an untethered jailbreak is around $1 million,” says Nikias Bassen, aka Pimskeks, a lanky 33-year-old iOS hacker who is part of the evad3rs hacker collective.
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From Alibaba to Baidu, China's biggest companies are supporting and even funding the practice, unfazed at the prospect of peeving Apple, which has sought to stamp out jailbreaking ever since it became a craze in the late 2000s.Īny hacker who can provide the full code for an untethered jailbreak, where the hack continues to work after the phone reboots, can expect a big pay check for their efforts. Why such interest and why such aggrandisement of iOS researchers? In the last two years, jailbreaking an iPhone - the act of removing iOS' restrictions against installing unauthorized apps, app stores and other features by exploiting Apple security - has become serious business in China. It was a bizarre trip hosted by an equally bizarre and secretive entity called TaiG (pronounced “tie-gee”), which flew the hackers to China to share techniques and tricks to slice through the defences of Apple's mobile operating system in front of an eager conference-hall crowd. I’m guessing it just translates to ‘famous person’, but we couldn't contain our giggles every time the translators said it,” says Joshua Hill, a 30-year-old from Atlanta who was one of the chosen few.
“They kept referring to us as ‘great gods’. They were put up in the five-star Park Hyatt and given a tour of the sites the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. In late March a handful of the western world's best-known iPhone hackers were flown business class to Beijing.
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