Mobile Generated News

Who Needs Apple When the FBI Could Hack Terrorist iPhone Itself
 BLOOMBERG

Selina Wang 

March 4, 2016 — 6:57 AM PST

• Experts say Feds could access data without going to court
• A kiosk in a Chinese mall holds a potential solution

Jonathan Zdziarski, a cybersecurity researcher who consults with law enforcement, says the FBI could learn something from back-alley techies in China who break into iPhones all the time. He describes a kiosk in a Shenzhen mall that charges $60 to upgrade a 16-gigabyte phone to 128 gigabytes. Using a PC, tweezers and screwdrivers, he says, the kiosk operator copies the contents of the iPhone onto a chip with more capacity then swaps it in.
Zdziarski says the FBI could use a similar workaround: copy the phone’s contents onto a chip so there’s a backup file when password attempts erase the device. The trick is figuring out a way of doing this hundreds of times without destroying the chip. He says the problem could be solved with research and that typically investigators can crack a passcode with fewer that 200 attempts because people usually choose easy ones.