Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Hacker

If you own an Apple product, you must have come across the name ‘Comex’ who is the developer of jailbreakMe, Spirit Jailbreak and has found many other exploits. Recently, Comex successfully developed untethered jailbreak for iPad 2 using JailbreakMe 3.0 which was indeed a great success. But have you ever seen him? or know his real name? Till now, the answer was ‘No’. Everyone knew him by the name of ‘Comex’ on Twitter. Thanks to Forbes as it managed to interview him and got some details. Comex is 19 years old and his real name is Nicholas Allegra. Below are some details and a picture of Comex.

Nicholas Allegra lives with his parents in Chappaqua, New York. The tall, shaggy-haired and bespectacled 19-year old has been on leave from Brown University since last winter, looking for an internship. […] 

“It feels like editing an English paper,” Allegra says simply, his voice croaking as if he just woke up, though we’re speaking at 9:30 pm. “You just go through and look for errors. I don’t know why I seem to be so effective at it.” […] 

Dino Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker’s Handbook, says JailbreakMe’s sophistication is on par with that of Stuxnet, a worm thought to have been designed by the Israeli or U.S. government to infect Iran’s nuclear facilities. He compares Allegra’s skills to the state-sponsored intruders that plague corporations and governments, what the cybersecurity industry calls “advanced-persistent threat” hackers: “He’s probably five years ahead of them,” says Dai Zovi. […] 

He calls himself an Apple “fanboy,” and describes Android’s more open platform as “the enemy.” “I guess it’s just about the challenge, more than anything else,” he says. […] 

The young hacker taught himself to code in the programming language Visual Basic at the age of nine, gleaning tricks from Web forums. “By the time I took a computer science class in high school, I already knew everything,” he says. When he found that he couldn’t save a screenshot from the Nintendo Wii video game Super Smash Brothers to his computer, he spent hours deciphering the file, and later worked on other Wii hacks, getting a feel for its obscure operating system.

[Via: iDownloadBlog


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