Israeli firm 'helped FBI crack San Bernardino gunman's cell phone without Apple's help'
Daily Mail Online

An Israeli company helped the FBI in unlocking the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters, according to reports. 

Israel's Cellebrite, is a provider of mobile forensic software that says it does business with thousands of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, militaries and governments in more than 90 countries.

An official source told NBC News that the company had helped. Neither the FBI nor Cellebrite has confirmed the reports.

The FBI hacked into the iPhone used by gunman Syed Farook, who died with his wife in a gun battle with police after they killed 14 people in December in San Bernardino. 

The iPhone, issued to Farook by his employer, the county health department, was found in a vehicle the day after the shooting.
An Israeli company may have helped the FBI in unlocking the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters. Syed Farook and his wife (both pictured) died in a gun battle with police after killing 14 people and injuring 22 in California, in December

The FBI is reviewing information from the iPhone, and it is unclear whether anything useful can be found.  

A great deal of speculation centers on Cellebrite — an Israel-based forensics firm that says it does business with thousands of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, militaries and governments in more than 90 countries — though it remains one of several possible candidates. 

A company spokesman declined to comment last week. 

Cellebrite, founded in 1999, is a subsidiary of Japan's Sun Cor and has had contracts with the FBI dating back to at least 2013. 

The firm makes devices that allow law enforcement to extract and decode data such as contacts, pictures and text messages from more than 15,000 kinds of smartphones and other mobile devices.

It also makes commercial products that companies can use to help their customers transfer data from old phones to new ones. Apple even uses Cellebrite devices in some of its stores. 

Suncorp's shares have more than doubled in the six weeks since Apple published its letter refusing to help the FBI, reports Fortune. 

The FBI's announcement is a public setback for Apple, as consumers suddenly discover they can't keep their most personal information safe and Apple remains in the dark about how to restore the security of its flagship product. 

Apple software engineers — and outside experts — are puzzled about how the FBI broke the digital locks on the phone without Apple's help. It also complicated Apple's job repairing flaws that jeopardize its software.
A court filing stated the government had 'successfully accessed the data stored on Farook's iPhone' without Apple's help but did not elaborate on how or what information it managed to recover

The Justice Department's announcement that it was dropping a legal fight to compel Apple to help it access the phone also took away any obvious legal avenues Apple might have used to learn how the FBI did it.

Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym vacated her February 16 order, which compelled Apple to help the FBI hack their phone, on Tuesday.

The Justice Department declined through a spokeswoman to comment Tuesday.

A few clues have emerged. A senior law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the FBI managed to defeat an Apple security feature that threatened to delete the phone's contents if the FBI failed to enter the correct passcode combination after 10 tries.

That allowed the government to repeatedly and continuously test passcodes in what's known as a brute-force attack until the right code is entered and the phone is unlocked.

It wasn't clear how the FBI dealt with a related Apple security feature that introduces increasing time delays between guesses. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss the technique publicly.

FBI Director James Comey has said with those features removed, the FBI could break into the phone in 26 minutes. 

Apple said in a statement Monday that the legal case to force its cooperation 'should never have been brought,' and it promised to increase the security of its products. 

CEO Tim Cook has said the Cupertino-based company is constantly trying to improve security for its users.

The FBI's announcement — even without revealing precise details — that it had hacked the iPhone was at odds with the government's firm recommendations for nearly two decades that security researchers always work cooperatively and confidentially with software manufacturers before revealing that a product might be susceptible to hackers.

The aim is to ensure that American consumers stay as safe online as possible and prevent premature disclosures that might damage a U.S. company or 
the economy.
In a stunning reversal last week, federal prosecutors asked a judge to halt a much-anticipated hearing on their efforts to force Apple to unlock the phone, saying an 'outside party' had stepped forward to help

As far back as 2002, the Homeland Security Department ran a working group that included leading industry technology industry executives to advise the president on how to keep confidential discoveries by independent researchers that a company's software could be hacked until it was already fixed. 

Even now, the Commerce Department has been trying to fine-tune those rules. The next meeting of a conference on the subject is April 8 in Chicago and it's unclear how the FBI's behavior in the current case might influence the government's fragile relationship with technology companies or researchers.

The industry's rules are not legally binding, but the government's top intelligence agency said in 2014 that such vulnerabilities should be reported to companies.

'When federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software — a so-called 'zero day' vulnerability because the developers of the vulnerable software have had zero days to fix it — it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than to hold it for an investigative or intelligence purpose,' the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement in April 2014.

The statement recommended generally divulging such flaws to manufacturers 'unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need.'

Last week a team from Johns Hopkins University said they had found a security bug in Apple's iMessage service that would allow hackers under certain circumstances to decrypt some text messages. The team reported its findings to Apple in November and published an academic paper after Apple fixed it.

'That's the way the research community handles the situation. And that's appropriate,' said Susan Landau, professor of cybersecurity policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She said it was acceptable for the government to find a way to unlock the phone but said it should reveal its method to Apple.

Mobile phones are frequently used to improve cybersecurity, for example, as a place to send a backup code to access a website or authenticate a user.

The chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, said keeping details secret about a flaw affecting millions of iPhone users 'is exactly opposite the disclosure practices of the security research community. The FBI and Apple have a common goal here: to keep people safe and secure. This is the FBI prioritizing an investigation over the interests of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.'