When the US government wanted to break into the iPhone of a terrorist who died a few years ago, it turned to a little-known cybersecurity start-up in Australia to help it do so. a Washington Post investigation revealed. Sydney-based Azimuth Security specializes in providing “best quality technical services” to customers, according to its website.
These services allowed the FBI to unlock Syed Rizwan Farook’s cell phone, which he and his wife Tashfeen Malik shot and killed 14 people in Southern California during the so-called “San Bernardino terrorist attack“In 2015. At the time, the government naturally wanted to know if the couple had ties to groups of foreign extremists, and the killer’s phone data was seen as a natural way to find out.
So the government paid Azimut about $ 900,000 to help him literally break the case. The company’s contract with the government was exposed on Wednesday by the Post and confirmed by additional reporting from the motherboard. The news solves a mystery for years about the identity of hackers, whose assessments have so far been a well-kept government secret.
Although based in Australia, Azimuth is actually owned L3 technologies, a large US defense contractor that provides a variety of defense and intelligence services to major federal agencies such as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, among others.
According to the publication, one of the company’s former researchers, David Wang, a “specialist” in cracking iOS, contributed to the development of a unique operating chain to penetrate Farook’s phone. Called the “Condor,” the operation was tested several times at FBI headquarters to ensure it could safely enter phone systems without damaging the data. Later, the feds will use it to successfully enter the device, finding that, contrary to their suspicions, the couple had no connections with foreign terrorist networks. (Interestingly, Wang is now being sued by Apple in a seemingly unrelated matter, according to the publication.)
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The San Bernardino iPhone case triggered what became known as the new “Crypto War” – a battle between Apple and the federal government for encrypted technology. Before breaking into the phone, the federal government essentially tried to intimidate Apple into decrypting its own product – the FBI sued the phone maker for access in 2016. The tech giant refused, and the trial was then over. suspended.
At the time, critics argued – and later proved correct – that the dispute was not really about technical access to the telephone. Instead, the feds just tried to do that set a legal precedent which would allow them to turn to the private sector to decrypt products for them in the future or to install backdoors in encrypted technology. Indeed, a Department of Justice in 2018 the inspector general’s report showed that the FBI didn’t really try so hard to find other options before downloading its lawsuit against Apple. He just wanted to force the tech company to do its job.
Writing in 2018, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focused on privacy, commented that:
“From the beginning, I suspected that the main objective of the FBI in its effort to access an iPhone found after the December 2015 mass shootings in San Bernardino was not simply to unlock the device in question. Rather, I thought the FBI’s intent with the dispute was to set a legal precedent that could force Apple to sabotage its own security mechanisms. “
In any case, the new details of the case only verify the idea that the federal government already has more than enough tools to penetrate any device in the country, if it chooses to do so. Indeed, as Azimuth proves, there is a booming market dedicated to selling that police access. Giving the government extended legal authority to force companies to crack down on their own products seems a bit like that. lazy, sincere. As long as I’m the top police officer in the country, we might as well expect the FBI to do the police work on its own.