Several years ago, when the US government wanted to invade a dead terrorist’s iPhone, they turned to a little-known cybersecurity startup in Australia to help them do that an investigation by the Washington Post has revealed. Based in Sydney, Azimuth Security specializes in providing “best-of-breed technical services” to customers, according to its website
These services allowed the FBI to unlock the cell phone of Syed Rizwan Farook who, along with his wife Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people in Southern California during the so-called “Terror attack in San BernardinoIn 2015. At the time, of course, the government wanted to know if the couple had links to foreign extremist groups, and the killer’s phone records were seen as a natural way to find out.
So the government paid Azimuth about $ 900,000 to help them literally solve the case. The company’s contract with the government was revealed and confirmed by the Post on Wednesday additional reporting from motherboard. The news solves a long-standing mystery about the hackers’ identities, which until now was a well-kept government secret.
Although based in Australia, Azimuth is actually owned by L3 Technologies, a major U.S. defense contractor offering 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 Post, it was one of the company’s former investigators, iOS cracking “ specialist ” David Wang, who helped develop a one-time exploit chain to break into Farook’s phone. The exploit, dubbed “Condor,” was tested multiple times at FBI headquarters to make sure it could safely enter phone systems without damaging data. Later, the FBI would 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 now being sued by Apple in an apparently unrelated case, the Post said.)
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The San Bernardino iPhone case sparked what became known as the new “Crypto War” – a battle between Apple and the federal government over encrypted technology. Before the phone was actually cracked, the federal government was essentially trying to bully Apple into decoding its own product – with the FBI suing the phone maker in court in 2016.
At the time, critics argued – and were later right – that the feud wasn’t really about technical access to the phone. Instead, the FBI was just trying set a legal precedent which allows them to call on the private sector to decode products for them in the future or install backdoors in encrypted technology. Indeed, a 2018 Ministry of Justice report of the inspector general showed that the FBI was not really trying to find other options before it filed a lawsuit against Apple. It just wanted to force the tech company to do its job for it.
In 2018, the privacy-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote the following:
“From the outset, we suspected that the FBI’s primary goal of accessing an iPhone found in the aftermath of the December 2015 mass shootings in San Bernardino was not just to unlock the device in question. We previously thought the FBI’s intent with the lawsuit was to set legal precedent that could force Apple to sabotage its own security mechanisms. “
In any case, the new details on the case only confirm the notion that the federal government already has more than enough tools to hack into any device in the country, should they so choose. Indeed, as Azimuth’s existence proves, there is a thriving market dedicated to selling that access to the police. Giving the government extensive legal power to force companies to put their own products behind the door seems a bit like it lazy, honestly. As long as they are the main police entity in the country, we might as well expect the FBI to do the police work itself.