It has been a little over a year since the mass shooting that occurred in San Bernardino, California. The incident itself was tragic, but it also sparked a national debate on security and data privacy. The FBI had been unsuccessful in retrieving data from an iPhone that was used by one of the shooters and requested assistance from Apple. While Apple refused and a court order was issued, the FBI was eventually able to unlock the handset with third party tools. Now, it appears some of those tools might have been stolen and leaked to the public.
According to Motherboard, Cellebrite, the mobile phone forensics company that helped the FBI late last year, reportedly had a massive amount of data that was stolen from them in January. A person claiming responsibility for the data exfiltration has now released files to the public that are allegedly from that breach, with a stern warning that tools made internally can always find a way out into the public.
Naturally, there is a lot of data to sift through, but some of the code closely resembles tools created and leveraged by jailbreaking and rooting communities to breach various mobile handsets.
Source: Motherboard
7 Comments - Add comment