When the U.S. government wanted to escape the iPhone of a terrorist who died several years ago, he turned to a little-known cybersecurity company in Australia to help them do just that. a Washington Post investigation has revealed. Azimuth Security, located in Sydney, specializes in providing “best-in-class technical services” to customers. according to your website.
These services allowed the FBI to unlock the cell phone of Syed Rizwan Farook who, along with his wife Tashfeen Malik, shot dead 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 foreign extremist groups and the killer’s phone details were seen as a natural way to find out.
So the government paid Azimut about $ 900,000 to help them literally break the case. The firm ‘s contract with the government was exposed by The Post on Wednesday and confirmed by additional reports from the motherboard. The news solves a mystery of many years about the identity of hackers, which until now has been a well-kept government secret.
Although located in Australia, Azimuth is owned by the company L3 Technologies, a large U.S. defense contractor that offers a wide 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 Post, it was one of the company’s former researchers, David Wang, a “cracking specialist” for iOS, who helped develop a unique operating chain to break into Farook’s phone. Named “Condor,” the exploit was tested several times at FBI headquarters to make sure it could be safely entered into phone systems without damaging the data. Later, the feds will use it to successfully break into the device, finding that, contrary to their suspicions, the couple had no ties to foreign terrorist networks. (Interestingly, Wang is being sued by Apple over a seemingly unrelated matter, according to the post).
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The San Bernardino iPhone case sparked what became known as the new “Cryptography War,” a battle between Apple and the federal government over encrypted technology. Before the phone cracked, the federal government essentially tried to intimidate Apple into decrypting its own product, with the FBI suing the phone maker in 2016. The tech giant refused and the lawsuit was later withdrawn.
At the time, critics argued — and later proved to be correct — that the dispute was not really about technical access to the telephone. Instead, the feds simply tried set a legal precedent this would allow them to call the private sector to decrypt products for them in the future or install back doors in encrypted technology. In fact, a 2018 Department of Justice report of the Inspector General showed that the FBI was not so much striving to find other options before withdrawing its lawsuit against Apple. I just wanted to force the tech company to do its job.
Writing in 2018, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which focuses on privacy, commented that:
“From the beginning, we suspected that the FBI’s primary goal in its effort to access an iPhone found in the wake of the December 2015 mass shootings in San Bernardino was not simply to unlock the device in question. Rather, we believed that the FBI’s intent with the litigation was to obtain legal precedents that could force Apple to sabotage its own security mechanisms. “
In any case, the new details about the case only verify the idea that the federal government already has more than enough tools to break into any device in the country, if it so chooses. In fact, as evidenced by the existence of Azimuth, there is a booming market dedicated to selling this access to the police. Giving the government extended legal authority to force companies to back down from their own products seems, well, a bit lazy, frankly. As long as they are the most important police entity in the country, we might expect the FBI to do the police work for themselves.