People were shocked when they got to know that their water tight safe iPhone wasn’t so safe. Their iPhones were not that private and secure. The recent incident where the FBI hacked a terrorist iPhone proved that the public could lose information to other authorities anytime because of the ‘unrevealed hacking procedures’. But there was the puzzled Apple Inc, who is still astounded and wondering as to “how did their “secure” iPhone get hacked?”
Apple Inc is at the moment wracking brains to make sure that it can retain the safety facility of its flagship product – the iPhone! A gunman who was involved in California’s mass shooting had an iPhone that the FBI managed to crack into. The FBI broke the digital barriers made by the company and this left the Apple Engineers dealing with software stunned, but they still were compelled to hand over their support to FBI for the iPhone hacking.
According to an anonymous senior law enforcement official, “FBI managed to defeat an Apple security feature that threatened to delete the phone’s contents if the FBI failed to enter the correct pass code combination after 10 tries. That allowed the government to repeatedly and continuously test pass codes in what’s known as a brute-force attack until the right code is entered and the phone is unlocked”, stated reports.
At present the information from the iPhone of the terrorist is under scrutiny and Apple is busy trying to better the safety catches on its products. FBI has formally admitted to using a mysterious method of hacking technology without any help ,from Apple in the court battle as it had threatened the “security” of Apple’s customers. The US Department of Justice has agreed that it no longer required the assistance from Apple Inc,” as the phone could be assessed with the help of a third party. Was it an Israeli firm which helped FBI?
The Director and Senior Fellow, Strategic Technologies Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C, James Andrew Lewis, has claimed to the Hindu that “There are several suspects. It could be the National Security Agency; it could be a private contractor hired by the FBI. We know that there are individuals and organizations that are capable of doing this.” Well, according to the latest reports the Justice Department will “rely upon the creativity of both the public and private sectors.”
Apple it seems had refused to help out in looking through the privacy of the discovered iPhone but now Mr. Cook has confirmed “We will continue to help law enforcement with their investigations, as we have done all along, and we will continue to increase the security of our products as the threats and attacks on our data become more frequent and more sophisticated. … This case raised issues which deserve a national conversation about our civil liberties, and our collective security and privacy.”
All said and done as states Mr. Lewis Apple has a problem on its hands as the “encryption is not as unbreakable as thought”. He also had an ace up his sleeve when he commented “Should an individual consumer have absolute protection of his mobile device? The immediate answer is yes, but then you realize that you have among these consumers, child traffickers, drug dealers and terrorists. So, this debate has no immediate conclusion.” Wonder what Apple has to say about this?
