Cellebrite, the Israeli digital forensics firm rumored to have assisted the FBI in breaking the security of the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, has stated that one of its servers has been hacked.
Cellebrite Data Forensics Company
According to The New York Times, Cellebrite has been the victim of a security breach of one of its servers. The digital forensics Israeli firm well-known for helping intelligence and law enforcement agencies to break into locked smartphones has itself fallen victim to hackers.
Cellebrite was allegedly used its digital forensic expertise to help the FBI with their San Bernardino shooting case. It is rumored that the FBI used Cellebrite's technology in order to bypass the passcode lock to gain entry and acquire data from shooter Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone 5c running iOS 9. However, neither the FBI nor Cellebrite has confirmed involvement with each other over the digital assistance.
Cellebrite Server Hacked
Technology news website Motherboard announced on Thursday, Jan. 12, that it had obtained 900 gigabytes of data belonging to the Israel-based company. Motherboard journalist Joseph Cox said that the 900 gigabytes of data have been given to him by an unidentified hacker that claimed they are stolen from Cellebrite's servers.
According to Apple Insider, Cox said in a series of messages posted to Twitter that most of the data consisted of technical information about the company's products, databases, and customer information. In an article, Cox also wrote in an article that the trove of data contained messages from authorities in the Arab Gulf, Turkey, and Russia.
A notice on Cellebrite's website confirms the data breach and explains that the hack took place on an external web server. Before taking steps to increase its security, the company is investigating the full extent of the data breach. The attacked server was used by Cellebrite to hold a "legacy database backup" of the company's end user license management system.
