A Portrait of Comex

If you’ve ever considered jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad, no doubt you’ve heard about an iOS hacker going by the handle Comex, the guy who discovered several important exploits, and the creator of JailbreakMe.

Besides his Twitter handle, we don’t know much about Comex. A Forbes journalist did a bit of digging and found out who Comex really is, and managed to talk to him…

This Forbes article doesn’t tell us much about Comex, but it gives enough to finally be able to put a face on a name.

These are a few extracts from the article:

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.

The article doesn’t really go in depth about who Comex is, but it’s nice to learn a little more about our favorite iOS hacker.

You can read the full article here.

[Via By: iphonedownloadblog.com]