14 DAY TRIAL // Known as Comex in the iOS community, Nicholas Allegra, the author of the sophisticated JailbreakMe application, is taking up an internship position with Apple mere weeks after being profiled by a major publication whose advice was: Apple, hire this man.
In a feature on Forbes, Comex is revealed to the world as a 19-year old who lives with his parents in New York.
Currently on leave from Brown University, Nicholas Allegra (Comex) has cracked open the iOS security on three different occasions. He is famous for creating the easiest and most effective iOS hacking tool - JailbreakMe.
Users simply access jailbreakme.com on their handsets, swipe to jailbreak, and that’s it.
Profiling Comex, the aforementioned media company ended with a postscript to Apple: “Perhaps your security team could use another intern.”
Two weeks later, this happened:
Tweet 1: It’s been really, really fun, but it’s also been a while and I’ve been getting bored. Tweet 2: So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple.
Comex’s tweets shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Hacking gurus are hard to come by and some of you will recall that Facebook grabbed Geohot - another jailbreak expert - earlier this year.
Allegra is modest when speaking about his feats - “It feels like editing an English paper … You just go through and look for errors. I don’t know why I seem to be so effective at it,” he said in an interview.
Security veterans are also blown away by his accomplishments.
According to Dino Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker’s Handbook, JailbreakMe can be compared to Stuxnet, a worm tasked with infecting Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Dai Zovi also compares Allegra’s skills to the state-sponsored intruders targeting corporations and governments.
The cybersecurity industry calls these attackers “advanced-persistent threat” hackers. According to Dino Dai Zovi, “[Allegra] is probably five years ahead of them.”