Apple paid a serious amount of money to a computer security researcher who managed to find a method to take control of iPhone cameras, something that normally shouldn't be possible, but here's how iOS it's not 100% sure, or at least it wasn't.
Apple received information from the researcher regarding the vulnerability that was discovered by him, it was disclosed in January, and those from Apple quickly resolved it through the updates that were released for the iOS operating system.
Apple had disclosed no less than 7 top zero-day vulnerabilities in its operating system for iDevices, the one regarding taking control over the camera being included, but for all of them it paid only 75 thousand dollars, a very small amount .
Normally, vulnerabilities discovered in the iOS operating system can fetch up to several hundred thousand dollars if they are sold to companies that specialize in creating software to exploit mobile operating systems, but this computer security researcher went a different route .
In December 2019, Pickren decided to put the idea that "bug hunting is finding assumptions in software and breaking those assumptions to see what happens" to the test. It opted to gather in Apple Safari for iOS and macOS to "bump the browser with obscure corner boxes" until strange behavior was discovered. Pickren focused on the camera's security model, which he readily admits was "pretty intense." This is something of an understatement, as Apple has made the camera very secure, or so it thought, by requiring any app that wants access to be explicitly granted camera/microphone permission, which permission is managed by an OS alert box .”
