Patrick Wardle

I'm your host, Aaron Y. Choulis, Apple's security writer at 9to5Mac.

And I'm very excited for this episode because today joining me to talk about the state of Apple's bug bounty program and the macOS threat landscape is Patrick Wardle, Apple security researcher, author, founder of the Objective-C nonprofit, and Ksenia Jambruk, our research engineer at Moonlock, the cybersecurity wing of MacPaw.

We'll dig into whether the recent changes to Apple's bug bounty program actually made the program healthier.

Then I'll hand it to Ksenia to walk us through Moonlock's recent mid-2026 macOS threat report.

And so if it wasn't for InfoSealers, I probably wouldn't have a career.

And when it comes to the research, Jonathan Levin has written books, so has Jaron Bradley, so has, I believe his last name is pronounced Singh, Amit Singh, Patrick Wardle, especially.

All of these people put a lot of effort into making their work accessible especially patrick wortel and as a result i've i've had it a lot easier than than them in terms of learning

yeah i i would i would echo my getting into re stuff years ago even 15 years ago it was not as well documented probably more so than than maybe mac internals right now but but a similar experience it just you really had to hunt for knowledge you had to go to i mean conferences were a big part of the knowledge sharing they played a crucial role there I've even found to this day with LLMs that areas that are just underrepresented, underserved in terms of research, naturally don't feed into LLMs as well either.