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Earlier this week, the FBI announced that it had accessed the locked phone of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who opened fire at a Trump rally last Saturday. A new report from Bloomberg today reveals more details about this process and the phone used by Crooks. After Saturday’s Trump rally shooting, the FBI said on Sunday that it had been unsuccessful in unlocking Crooks’ phone. The phone was then sent to the FBI lab in Quanitco, Virginia, and on Tuesday the bureau confirmed that it had successfully unlocked the phone in question Until today, however, we had no indication whether...

Israeli forensics company Cellebrite – which has gained a reputation for unlocking mobile devices like the iPhone to obtain personal data without the passcode or biometrics – claims it can now unlock any iOS device running up to iOS 12.3. The firm boasted of its capability in a tweet posted on Friday, which promoted UFED Premium, the latest version of its Universal Forensic Extraction Device.

The hacker says this demonstrates that when organizations make hacking tools, those techniques will eventually find their way to the public. In January, Motherboard reported that a hacker had stolen 900GB of data from mobile phone forensics company Cellebrite. The data suggested that Cellebrite had sold its phone cracking technology to oppressive regimes such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia. Now the hacker responsible has publicly released a cache of files allegedly stolen from Cellebrite relating to Android and BlackBerry devices, and older iPhones, some of which may have been copied from publicly available phone cracking tools. "The...

Cellebrite, the third-party which the FBI contracted with to unlock the San Bernardino terrorists' iPhone 5, has itself been hacked and the data and techniques it used to hack that iPhone 5 among others of its proprietary technology were stolen, just as I predicted would happen if Apple were forced to provide a back-door as the FBI wanted! Vanity Fair has an article on the Cellebrite crime but I cannot post it due to copyright issues. Here is the link only. — Swordmaker http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/a-hacker-just-proved-that-apple-may-have-been-right-about-the-fbi

The FBI, DOJ, and numerous other U.S. government agencies have acquired mobile forensics and smart phone hacking tools from Cellebrite — an Israeli based cybersecurity firm — for the past decade. Cellebrite manufactures the UFED Touch, a mobile forensic extraction device which the FBI used to hack into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c. CNN Money reported last week the FBI alone signed 187 contracts with Cellebrite over the past seven years — averaging $10,883 per contract — according to U.S. government records. That’s more than $2 million the FBI dropped on mobile forensics products and services. The Federal Procurement...

Image Source: RT.com For the time being, Apple’s legal battle with the FBI appears to be on hold. Though the FBI had previously demanded Apple write a completely new version of iOS to bypass built-in security measures, the FBI earlier this week indicated that they may have found a way into the locked iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists without Apple’s help.The FBI hasn’t officially confirmed it, but it’s become plainly evident that the Bureau has enlisted the help of an Israeli software forensics company called Cellebrite. According to Cellebrite’s website, the company provides forensics solutions that can...