Meeting Cellebrite – Israel’s master phone crackers

It’s an Israeli company that helps police forces gain access to data on the mobile phones of suspected criminals.

phone crackers Get an exclusive insight into Cellebrite, Israel's leading phone cracking experts, in this captivating blog post. Explore their remarkable skills and techniques for unlocking mobile devices.
Image by Esa Riutta from Pixabay

Now the company has told the BBC that it can get through the defences of just about any modern smartphone. But the firm refuses to say whether it supplies its technology to the police forces of repressive regimes.

Last week Cellebrite

was showing off its technology to British customers.

I received an invitation to a hotel in the Midlands, where police officers from various parts of the UK had gathered to observe equipment and software.

The phone was operating on an older version of Android, specifically 4.2. They allowed me to take the phone with me for thirty minutes for experimental purposes. I set a password, took photos, and sent a text message using the device.

When we returned, Yuval Ben-Moshe from Cellebrite took the phone and simply plugged it in via the charging socket to what looked like a chunky tablet computer.

He clarified that this was the type of mobile unit that the company provided to police forces for on-site data extraction.

 

“We can pretty much pull up any of the data that resides on the phone,” he said.

He then downloaded the photos I’d taken and the message I’d sent on to a USB stick – the evidence of my activities could now be in the hands of the police.

The ease with which the security on the phone was bypassed was impressive, if not slightly concerning. However, it is worth noting that the phone used for the demonstration was not particularly advanced, and I had not utilized services like WhatsApp, which offer additional security measures.

But Mr Ben-Moshe claimed that his firm could access data on “the largest number of devices that are out there in the industry”.

Even Apple’s new iPhone 7?

“We can definitely extract data from an iPhone 7 as well – the question is what data.”

He said that Cellebrite

had the biggest research and development team in the sector, constantly working to catch up with the new technology.

He remained evasive regarding the extent of data extraction from services like WhatsApp, stating that it is not a straightforward yes or no. However, he hinted that criminals might be deluding themselves if they believed any form of mobile communication was completely secure.

In the past, there were reports indicating that Cellebrite had assisted the FBI in accessing the iPhone 5C abandoned by Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Ben-Moshe had nothing to say on this matter: “We cannot comment on any of our customers.”

And on the matter

of how fussy Cellebrite was about the customers for equipment that is used by law enforcement agencies around the world, he was also tight-lipped.

When I asked whether the company worked with oppressive governments he said: “I don’t know the answer to that and I’m in no position to comment on that.” And when I pressed him, he would say only that Cellebrite operated under international law and under the law of every jurisdiction where it worked.

Mobile phone companies are making great advances in providing secure devices – and law enforcement agencies in the UK and the US are complaining that this is helping criminals and terrorists evade detection.

But last month

Reports indicated that another Israeli firm, NSO Group, which also serves law enforcement and intelligence agencies, was responsible for a hack that enabled the easy “jailbreaking” of any iPhone and the installation of malware.

It seems the technology battle between the phone makers and those trying to penetrate their devices – for good reasons or bad – is a more even fight than we may have imagined.

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