motherboard.vice.com
>In January, Motherboard reported that a hacker had stolen 900GB of data from mobile phone forensics company Cellebrite. The data suggested that Cellebrite had sold its phone cracking technology to oppressive regimes such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia.
>Now the hacker responsible has publicly released a cache of files allegedly stolen from Cellebrite relating to Android and BlackBerry devices, and older iPhones, some of which may have been copied from publicly available phone cracking tools.
>"The debate around backdoors is not going to go away, rather, its is almost certainly going to get more intense as we lurch toward a more authoritarian society," the hacker told Motherboard in an online chat.
>"It's important to demonstrate that when you create these tools, they will make it out. History should make that clear," they continued.
>Cellebrite is an Israeli firm which specializes in extracting data from mobile phones for law enforcement agencies. The company's flagship product, the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), typically comes as a small, laptop-sized device, and can pull SMS messages, emails, and more from thousands of different mobile phone models. The investigator needs to have physical access to the phone to analyze it.
>A Motherboard investigation found that US state police and highway patrol agencies have collectively spent millions of dollars on Cellebrite technology.
>The hacker claimed to have taken the newly released data from a remote Cellebrite server, and said they had extracted them from UFED images. They told Motherboard that the files were encrypted, likely in an attempt to protect Cellebrite's intellectual property, but that they managed to bypass the protections.
