iPhone Super-Hacker Comex, goes from Apple to intern for Google

If Apple couldn’t appreciate one of the most talented hackers to ever touch its products, perhaps its biggest competitor can.

Nicholas Allegra, a.k.a. Comex, who rose to fame as the 19-year-old creator of the JailbreakMe hacking tools for iPhone and iPad before being hired by Apple, has found a new home: Google.

“In other news, I’m going to intern for Google in a few weeks,” Allegra wrote on Twitter Tuesday night.

He didn’t immediately respond to my request for more information about what he’ll be doing at Google. But he added on Twitter that he won’t be working on Android, an operating system that he has never “like[d] enough to ever want to hack it.”

Allegra is no ordinary college intern. When he pseudonymously released JailbreakMe 3 in the summer of 2011, more than two million people used his tool to remove the download restrictions on their iPhones and iPads within a month. And when his identity as a college student on leave from Brown University was revealed, the information security community was baffled that a teenager had singlehandedly unlocked the most tightly restricted consumer operating system in the world; Charlie Miller, a former NSA analyst and well-known Apple security researcher, told me at the time that he was “totally blown away.” Fellow Apple hacker Dino Dai Zovi later commented to another reporter that Allegra seemed to be “from the future.”

Within two months, Allegra was given an internship at Apple. But just over a year later, Allegra says he was suddenly let go for failing to respond to an email that would have extended his employment. After that missed deadline, the offer was permanently rescinded. “I wasn’t too happy about it, but it didn’t seem like I was able to fix it,” he told me at the time.

For Allegra’s sake–and for Google’s–here’s hoping Mountain View’s human resources department is more willing to accommodate a missed email or two from their new hacker savant.

Apple hired Allegra as an intern in August 2011. It even offered to extend his employment after an year but Allegra claims he missed responding to the mail that had the offer, following which Apple took the offer back.

For the uninitiated, users can run unapproved third party apps on their iOS devices after jailbreaking them.

The first version of JailbreakMe was released in 2007 used to jailbreak the iPhone and iPod Touch running the 1.1.1 version of iPhone OS and was developed by nine anonymous hackers. This was followed by the second version of the hack in 2010 released by Comex, that allowed users to jailbreak iOS 3.1.2 to 4.0.1 on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

The JailbreakMe 3.0 hack was released in 2011, and allowed anyone to jailbreak iOS devices on versions 4.3 to 4.3.3 and iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3. It was the first hack to jailbreak the iPad 2. The jailbreak was a browser based hack that didn't involve the use of any other tools. Apple was able to fix all the JailbreakMe hacks with a software update.