Getting to Know Cellebrite, the Israeli Company Specialising in Mobile Phone Cracking

Last February, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) caused a stir by requesting that Apple unlock an iPhone device belonging to a suspect in the San Bernardino shooting case. Apple flatly refused the request. However, a month later, the FBI announced that it had successfully unlocked the iPhone in question and accessed the data inside it with the help of a “third party”. The identity of this third party was not disclosed, but the name of an Israeli company was widely linked to the case. It is Cellebrite, a specialist in smartphone cracking that offers its services commercially. In an interview with the BBC, as summarised by KompasTekno on Tuesday (29/11/2016), Cellebrite claimed it could bypass the defences of various modern smartphones. “We can access all the data on the phone,” said Yuval Ben Moshe, VP of Business Development for Forensics at Cellebrite, while demonstrating the capabilities of a special tool from Cellebrite in cracking smartphones. For example, a Galaxy S5 device running an older version of Android 4.2 was used. Even though it was locked with fingerprint lock and PIN, Moshe easily unlocked the security on the phone after connecting it to a special device shaped like a tablet. Moshe said his team is capable of cracking devices running the latest operating systems, as well as unlocking data from conversations in instant messaging applications. Who is Cellebrite? This company, owned by Sun Corporation, is a data forensics firm specialising in data acquisition, data transfer, and analysis of mobile phones and devices based in Petah Tikva, Israel. For years, the FBI has relied on Cellebrite’s services to crack phones owned by suspects in criminal cases. Cellebrite initially did not operate in the field of phone cracking. The company, founded in 1999, began by offering data transfer services from one phone to another. This was needed by mobile retailers when customers upgraded from old phones to new ones. Later, Cellebrite developed its expertise into a new business, offering tools to bypass security and extract data from phones for “forensic and law enforcement” purposes. In early 2007, when it first marketed its tool, Cellebrite claimed it could crack “more than 1,000 device models” consisting of various phones and PDAs.