Finally we have the answer to how Cellebrite managed to hack the iPhone in the San Barnardino shooter case. The answer is repourposing other existing cracking tools that are used to jailbreak iPhones.
Last month a hacker broke into Cellebrite’s servers and stole 900 GB of data. The same hacker is now dumping the tools stolen from the company as reported by the Motherboard.
The publicly released files relate not just to Android and BlackBerry devices, but also to older iPhone models. Some of this data seems to be copied from other cracking tools which can be found with a little online digging.
As the United States heads towads a more authoritarian society with Trump at the leading position, the hacker wants to make a point here. Considering Trump’s appointees in important positions who would really want authorities to have backdoors in various encryption tools so that they can snoop to their hearts desires, now the hacker’s position does not seem so strange.
“The debate around the backdoors is not going to go away, rather it is certainly going to get even more intense as we move toward a more authoritarian society. It is important to demonstrate that when you create these hacking tools, they will make it out. The history should make that clear,” the hacker said.
The data that the hacker dumped comes from a remote Cellebrite server, extracted from UFED images. The information had been encrypted, but the hackers managed to break down the security layers. According to the ReadMe file that accompanies the data dump, the fully functioning Python script set to utilize the exploits, ripped and decrypted, is included in the package for which links had been shared over Pastebin.
