Speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security in Manhattan, New York, FBI forensic expert Stephen Flatley lambasted Apple for making it so hard to hack the iPhones.
Flatley called the company “jerks” and “evil geniuses” for making his and his colleagues’ investigative work harder, while pointing out how Apple has changed the hash iterations for passwords from 10,000 to 10,000,000 (via Motherboard).
While referring to the difficulty of cracking a password using a “brute force” method on iPhones, the FBI hacker explained that password attempts speed has now gone from 45 passwords a second to one every 18 seconds. While there are tools to input thousands of passwords in a very short period of time, it becomes much harder and slower to crack if the attempts per minute are limited.
“Your crack time just went from two days to two months,” Flatley said. “At what point is it just trying to one up things and at what point is it to thwart law enforcement?” he added. “Apple is pretty good at evil genius stuff.”
On the other hand, Flatley repeatedly praised the israeli company Cellebrite, which sells hacking devices and technologies to law enforcement agencies around the world. Flatley said that they are the ones who can counter Apple’s security technology. “If you have another evil genius, Cellebrite,then maybe we can get into that front,” he said, facetiously coughing as he said “Cellebrite.”
Meanwhile, Apple gets praised by cybersecurity experts from all over the world for its iPhone encryption, as it keeps the average consumer’s data safe from hackers and authoritarian surveillance.
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If i I was Apple, that’s pretty much the best compliment there is.
I thought “loose lips sink ships”. Why is the FBI publicly telling terrorists which phone is best to use for their purposes? Or maybe they are trying to trick terrorists into using iPhones – telling them they are so hard to crack, but secretly have backdoor access to the iPhones.
The “evil genius” factor is exactly why I remain in the Apple universe.
Yes, there are other things I really like about Apple products (and some that drive me downright batty), but the security and anonymity features are the ultimate reasons why I refuse to check out Android, Google Home, Amazon products, etc. If I honestly thought other companies cared as much about protecting my personal data, I might be willing to give them a shot.
Pretty much the same reasons I am on board.
I bet Flatley uses an iPhone himself, and secretly pets it and thanks Apple for keeping his mistresses numbers encrypted from his wife.