The mobile hacking company Cellebrite has been pretty popular last year due to its involvement in the hacking in the iPhone that belongs to the terrorist from San Bernardino scandal. Now the company again made it to the headlines, not because of their accomplishment, but the reason is different. A hacker managed to hack the company and steal more than 900 gigabytes of data.
According to a report from the Motherboard, an unnamed hacker has breached Cellebrite’s systems and managed to steal 900 Gb of data. The data includes the customer usernames and passwords, the data collected by the company from various mobile devices, and other technical information of the company.
All the stolen files and data is reportedly traded in some IRC chat rooms, but the hacker claims that he did not leak the data to the public. The motivation of the hacker is still not clear, but he seems to have dome this against the changes in surveillance legislation and the “recent stance taken by Western governments.”
The data provided by the hacker is legitimate, confirmed Motherboard. They also said that one of their external servers had been accessed by an unauthorised party. The company launched an investigation team and the analysis suggested that an attacker has breached their server that is storing a legacy backup of the Cellebrite firm’s end-user license management system.
“The company had previously migrated to a new user accounts system,” Cellebrite stated. “Presently, it is known that the information accessed includes basic contact information of users registered for alerts or notifications on Cellebrite products and hashed passwords for users who have not yet migrated to the new system. To date, the company is not aware of any specific increased risk to customers as a result of this incident; however, my.Cellebrite account holders are advised to change their passwords as a precaution.”
The company is in the process of notifying affected customers and it has informed law enforcement about the incident.