In the world of technology, stories of geniuses challenging corporate giants are very common. We saw in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley that both Apple and Microsoft were created by breaking stereotypes, copying, plagiarizing, and flouting many intellectual property laws. However, they have reached a point where these companies have ended up becoming overly serious corporations, which conflicts with their more rebellious beginnings.
Now they are serious companies, and although they like hackers, they have become too corporate. We are going to tell you the story of Nicholas Allegra, a young man whose talent for cybersecurity allowed him to find critical flaws in their operating system. But he lost his golden opportunity due to the most trivial human error: forgetting to reply to an email.
Comex and his JailBreak miracle
It was the early 2010s, the iPhone 4 dominated the market, and Apple maintained strict control over what its users could—and couldn’t—do with their mobile devices. But telling hackers they can’t do whatever they want with their smartphones is like trying to put gates on a field. Soon, the James Breaking community emerged, whose goal was to free the phone from the restrictions imposed by Apple. They wanted to bypass the company’s restrictions and have unlimited access to the device’s software.
After all, Apple had no right to tell them what kind of apps they could install on their smartphones; they wanted to be able to customize the system to a degree that the company simply did not allow. In conclusion, it was a fight for the user’s digital freedom. This is where Nicholas Allegra—with the online nickname Comex—became an Internet legend: at just 19 years old, he managed to launch his most famous creation and earned a reputation as a technical prodigy who was always one step ahead of iOS in terms of vulnerabilities.
The hack that caught Apple’s attention
Alegra launched his jailbreak tool mi 3.0, known by the code name Stellar. This quickly put him on Apple’s radar. He had managed to find a critical vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser. The flaw was in the way Safari handled the display of PDF files. The goal was not only to find the flaw, but also to create an exploit that made it incredibly easy to use. He had managed to create a drive-by jailbreak: the user did not need cables, computers, or even programming knowledge… They just had to visit a website and click “Install.”
Not only was this an automatic exploit, but it also gave the user complete control over their device through this security flaw. This exposed Apple: JailbreakMe promised a fundamental part of the system through a simple browser, which was a huge security embarrassment for a company that prided itself on the robustness of its ecosystem. Millions of users rushed to download the tool, forcing Apple to work around the clock to release emergency patches. An entire NASDAQ-listed company had been checkmated by a 19-year-old hacker.
From Nemesis to Employee
If you can’t beat your enemy, join them. That’s why Apple decided to recruit its biggest adversary with a very lucrative job offer. In August 2011, Allegra was hired as a remote intern. He was placed on the security team with the goal of using his brilliant mind to find and patch the same vulnerabilities he had exploited. Everyone was winning: Apple gained elite talent, and Allegra earned a very lucrative salary from one of the most prestigious companies in the world.
However, hackers are a different breed, and at the end of 2012, Nicholas Allegra admitted that he had stopped working at Apple. The reason? He had simply forgotten to check his email, where there was a message from the company asking him to continue working with them. When they didn’t receive a response, Apple assumed he wasn’t interested in continuing, so they closed his file. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that Silicon Valley corporate bureaucracy takes these things very seriously.
But we shouldn’t worry about Nicholas Allegra. Shortly after his departure, he was hired by Google as an intern. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that Silicon Valley is eager to recruit this type of worker… Even if he doesn’t like answering corporate emails.