October 25, 2016
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 which demonstrates one of the company’s products that unlocked the iPhone device in few hours.
McSira is likely offering these download links for firmware and software files so that its customers – which, according to its site, are “police, military and security agencies in the E.U. and other parts of the world” – can conveniently update their hardware to the latest version.