Israeli firm suspected to have helped FBI hack into iPhone has firmware leaked online

Cellebrite, an Israeli company that specialises in digital forensics, and was rumoured to have helped the FBI crack the San Bernardino terrorists iPhone has had its own secret firmware leaked online. A re-seller of the company's products is allegedly distributing copies of Cellebrite's firmware and software for anyone to download.

Motherboard reports that the re-seller McSira Professional Solution is distributing the file and claims to help police, military and security agencies in the EU and other parts of the world. McSira hosts software for various versions of Cellebrite's Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) hardware that investigators can use to bypass security barriers in phones and extract data from them.

Although Cellebrite is known to keep its sensitive firmware in-house and secured, the latest leak may still give researchers, rivals or even potential hackers a chance to figure out how the Israeli firm breaks into and analyses phones by reverse-engineering the files.

However, the company has a safety net in place, in case something like this happens. Mike Reilly, a PR firm employee that works with Cellebrite said that McSira's links "do not allow access to any of the solutions without a license key". This implies that even if rivals or hackers download the software without a code authorised by Cellebrite or a reseller, it is useless.

Last month the firm had claimed that it had the technology to unlock just about any smartphone including latest releases like the iPhone 7. The company has also said that end-to-end encryption is a myth and criminals may be fooling themselves if they are of the opinion that any form of mobile communication is fully secure.