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The Israeli firm Cellebrite , which provides digital forensics tools and software to help law enforcement access mobile phones in investigations, has had its firmware and software leaked online. Yes, you heard that right. Cellebrite's most sensitive in-house capabilities have been made public by one of its products' resellers, who is now distributing copies of Cellebrite's firmware and software for anyone to download. The apparent reseller is McSira Professional Solutions , which hosts software for various versions of Cellebrite's Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED). UFED is one of the company's key products that help investigators bypass the security mechanisms of mobile phones, especially iPhones, and extract all data and passwords from them. For the Cellebrite's hand on iOS devices, you can watch the 2015 YouTube video (below), which demonstrates one of the company's products that unlocked the iPhone device in few hours. Download  L...

The FBI didn't disclose the identity of the third-party company that helped them access the San Bernardino iPhone, but it has been widely believed that the Israeli mobile forensic firm Cellebrite was hired by the FBI to put an end to the Apple vs. FBI case. For those unfamiliar in the Apple vs. FBI case: Apple was engaged in a legal battle with the Department of Justice over a court order that was forcing the company to write software, which could disable passcode protection on terrorist's iPhone, helping them access data on it. However, Apple refused to comply with the court order, so the FBI hired an unknown third-party firm, most likely Cellebrite, who managed to successfully hack the locked iPhone 5C used by the terrorist in the San Bernardino shooting incident last year. The new method helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hack iPhone 5C, but that wasn't the FBI's victory as the method didn't work on iPhone 5S and later iPhone...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The security features built into Apple 's iOS software are so good that the police are unable to gain access to defendant's iPhones when they need to.  Companies like Apple and Google are being asked by law enforcement officials to bypass these protections to aid in investigations. Apple receives so many police demands to decrypt seized iPhones that it has created a waiting list to handle the deluge of requests. In one of the recent cases, according to court documents, the federal agents were baffled by the encrypted iPhone 4S of a man in Kentucky who was charged for supplying crack cocaine. CNET reports that ATF agent Rob Maynard spent three months trying to "locate a local, state, or federal law enforcement agency with the forensic capabilities to unlock" an iPhone 4S. After everyone said that they did not have the capabilities, Maynard turned to Apple. Apple can reportedly bypass the security lock to get access to data on a phone, download it to an ...

Using a new attack on most popular Android phones platform, a team of researchers in Germany managed to grab stored cryptographic keys if the device is frozen state for an hour. The method which able to bypasses Google's data scrambling encryption system introduced in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to reveal the phone's hidden data, when leaving Android phones in a freezer until they fell below -10 degrees Celsius, which revealed previously scrambled data, including contact lists, browsing histories, and photos. The team developed software called FROST , Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones, which lets them copy data from the phone for analysis on a computer. Abstract   explains ," We present FROST, a tool set that supports the forensic recovery of scrambled telephones. To this end we perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and retrieve disk encryption keys from RAM. We show that cold boot attacks against Android phones are general...