The famous Israeli security firm Cellebrite which is famous for cracking the iPhone 5C from San Bernardino shooter case is back in news and this time for a claim the company has made which is: that the Advanced Investigative Service(CAIS) can now hack iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus.
The announcement came from Cellebrite’s director of forensics research, Shahar Tal who Tweeted that their CAIS tool now supports lawful unlocking and evidence extraction of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices.
Cellebrite's CAIS now supports lawful unlocking and evidence extraction of iPhone 4S/5/5C/5S/6/6+ devices (via our in-house service only).
— Shahar Tal (@jifa) February 22, 2017
From the way, the last year case went we can say that Cellebrite can hack 4S, 5C and 5S from Apple without any trouble but Apple is not the only company whose security encryption was compromised by this company. Cellebrite can already unlock Samsung Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S7.
The Intercept reported back in 2016 that to unlock a smartphone, Cellebrite charges nearly 1,500 per phone with a premium unlocking subscription service costs $250,000.
Other than CAIS tool, Cellebrite is also offering powerful Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) Physical Analyser 6.0 for the field related assignment. According to the Cellebrite website, the UFED delivers only complete, end-to-end Digital Forensics Platform on the market and has more than 40,000 UFED licenses deployed globally in 100 countries. The UFED tool is being heavily advertised by the company claiming that it can also extract data from messengers like Threema, Telegram, Surespot, and Signal.
Though there is not much available on Cellebrite’s website about its new capabilities of unlocking iPhone 6 and 6 Plus the reports are that the company has been selling its products to countries like Turkey, USA, United Arab Emirates, and Russia. Therefore, its capabilities matter since Turkey, Russia and UAE are known for violating human rights.
It must be noted that in last month, Cellebrite has suffered a massive data breach in which data of about 900GB in size has been stolen while earlier this month the very same hackers leaked the stolen data on the Dark Web.
Image credit: Hackread
