Two days after an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI announced it had “obtained” the shooter’s cell phone. The bureau has not revealed how it broke into the phone or what it found on the phone, but the speed with which it broke in was striking, which security experts say indicates the increased effectiveness of phone hacking tools.
Field agents in Pennsylvania tried but failed to break into Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone, the bureau said in a call with reporters Sunday. The device was then sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.
“Almost every police department in the country has a device called Cellebrite”
Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior technology expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said law enforcement agencies have a variety of tools to extract material from cell phones. “Almost every police department in the country has a device called a Cellebrite, which is a device used to extract data from cell phones, and it also has some functionality to unlock the phone,” Quintin said. Cellebrite, based in Israel, is one of several companies that provide mobile device capture tools (MDTFs) to law enforcement. The efficacy and cost of third-party MDTFs vary, and it is possible that the FBI also has its own in-house tools. last year, TechCrunch According to the report, Cellebrite asked users to “shush” to continue using its technology.
“To me, it seems reasonable to have a field office there. [in Pennsylvania] It’s not like Quantico has some more advanced technology that breaks into modern phones,” Quentin told edge Hours later, the FBI announced it had successfully hacked into Crooks’ phone. “I have no doubt that Quantico was able to break into this phone, either through an internal attack or through external help (such as from Cellebrite).
A 2020 survey by Upturn, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, found that MDTF is available to more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. GrayKey is one of the most expensive and advanced of these tools, costing between $15,000 and $30,000, according to Upturn’s report. Grayshift, the company behind GrayKey, announced in March that its Magnet GrayKey device “fully supports” Apple iOS 17, Samsung Galaxy S24 devices, and Pixel 6 and 7 devices.
For law enforcement, third-party MDTFs are an effective way to address tech companies’ hesitancy to help hack into customers’ phones.
In previous mass shootings or domestic terrorism incidents, the FBI has spent weeks or months trying to hack into suspects’ phones. The bureau famously clashed with Apple in late 2015 when Apple refused to help law enforcement bypass encryption on the iPhone of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooter. Early the next year, Apple rejected a federal court order to help the FBI access the shooter’s phone, which the company said would effectively require it to build a backdoor into the iPhone’s encryption software.
“The government asked Apple to attack our own users, undermining decades of security advances that have protected our customers,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in an open letter in February 2016. The FBI did have access to the backup of the shooter’s phone, which has been uploaded to his iCloud account, but the last backup appears to have been six weeks before the shooting, so the FBI wants to unlock the phone. Cook claimed in the letter that the FBI had asked Apple to modify its iOS system so that passwords could be entered electronically, in what he called a “brute force” attack.
“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way will undoubtedly create a backdoor,” Cook wrote. “While we trust the federal investigation The Bureau’s intentions are good, but it is wrong for the government to force us to build backdoors into our products. Ultimately, we worry that this requirement will harm the freedoms and freedoms our government is supposed to protect.
Trump – then one of several candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination – was among those who called for Apple to surrender to the FBI
Trump – one of several candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination at the time – was among those who called for Apple to surrender to the FBI. “First and foremost, Apple should provide security for this phone,” he told the crowd at a rally. “I think what you should do is boycott Apple until they provide security numbers.”
Three months after the shooting, the FBI dropped its indictment against Apple in March 2016, not because Apple decided to comply with the FBI’s request, but because the bureau obtained the break-in method from an “outside source” and no longer Requires Apple technology. Reuters Cellebrite was initially reported to have helped the FBI hack into the device, but the bureau never confirmed this, although then-Director James Comey and Senator Dianne Feinstein did reveal that the FBI spent It costs about $1 million to unlock the phone.
2021, Washington post According to reports, Australian security company Azimuth Security unlocked the phone of the San Bernardino shooter.
The San Bernardino shooting isn’t the only case in which the FBI has tried to force Apple to hack into iPhones on its behalf. After a gunman opened fire at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, in December 2019, the FBI asked Apple to unlock two iPhones linked to the gunman. After Apple declined, Attorney General William Barr said the company had failed to provide “substantial assistance” in the case. Apple maintains that it “provided various information relevant to the investigation” and turned over “gigabytes of information” to the FBI, including “iCloud backups, account information and multiple accounts” related to the investigation transaction data”. shooter. But Apple again refused to unlock the gunman’s phone.
The FBI said it successfully hacked into the shooter’s phone in March 2020 after months of trying, and the bureau harshly criticized Apple in its statement. “Thanks to the outstanding work of the FBI — not Apple — we were able to unlock Alshamrani’s phone,” Barr said at the time. FBI Director Christopher Wray said this was done “without virtually any assistance from Apple.”
Riana Pfefferkorn, a research fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the Pensacola shooting was one of the last times federal law enforcement agencies loudly condemned encryption technology.
“When undemocratic governments use technology that hacks into people’s phones, there are serious human rights risks.”
“That was over four years ago, and technology on both sides of the equation has only continued to evolve since then,” Pfefferkorn said in an email to us. edge.
Vendors and law enforcement agencies often gain access to phones by exploiting “vulnerabilities in the software running on the phone” or through brute force guessing of passwords, Pfefferkorn said. “It only takes a few minutes to brute force a four-digit password, but it takes hours to crack a six-digit password,” Pfefferkorn said.
“In addition to the FBI’s own internal tools, there are tools provided by third-party vendors (such as the San Bernardino shooter’s cell phone), some of which understand who their customers are more closely than others. When not There are serious human rights risks when democratic governments use technology that hacks into people’s phones, but these tools are widely available at the right price.
