Recently, a 14-year-old made an interesting discovery on Apple‘s proprietary videotelephony gadget, FaceTime. He discovered that you could include yourself to a Group FaceTime call and force recipients to answer immediately. To induce this, the user starts a FaceTime video call with a contact, then whereas the call is “ringing,” they add themselves to the call as a third party by tapping “Add Person” and entering their own cameraphone number. If properly performed, a Group FaceTime call is started and the native recipient’s audio begins to stream before the call is accepted.
This discovery has now earned the teenager identified as Grant Thompson a recognition and reward from Apple. The tech giant has established that it will be promoting the family with compensation for finding the bug as part of its bug bounty reward program. The teenager will Furthermore receive a scholarship for his education what is truly a gift from Apple. No quantity was stated however if the compensation is part of the company’s Bug Bounty program, the number could be anywhere between $25,000 and $200,000.
Apple was at initial sluggish to acknowledge the bug when Thompson’s mother Michelle attempted to warn Apple about the exploit a week before it became major news. The company was prompted to acknowledge the problem! and the discovery whenever handful of tweets about the issue. The feature was temporarily disabled however the bug has currently been fixed in the latest iOS 12.1.4 and macOS Mojave updates. The release note for the new iOS 12.1.4 variant includes an acknowledgement of the discovery, crediting Grant together another individual identified as Draven Morris.