Photo credit: @beebomco | Twitter
FBI Brands Apple 'Jerks' For Refusal To Open iPhones
In recent years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been faced with the fact that when it comes to technology, they are often at the mercy of Californian tech titans.
Trying, for example, to open up a terrorists’ iPhone but getting no help from the inventors even though they are as American as apple pie, is causing headaches for a lot of FBI agents.
One of them, FBI forensic expert Stephen Flatley, pointed it out best this week when he claimed that Apple where clear “jerks” for the way they acted around these cases.
Whilst speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security in Manhattan, Mr Flatley said: "At what point is it just trying to one-up things and at what point is it to thwart law enforcement?"
His frustration comes as he revealed that the late Steve Jobs company has now made it even harder to access the inner workings of iPhones by adding a trick that makes password cracking software much slower and thus even more difficult for law enforcement.
That means, Mr Flatley explained, that “password attempts speed went from 45 passwords a second to one every 18 seconds,” referring to the difficulty of cracking a password using a “brute force” method in which every possible permutation is tried.
There are tools that can input thousands of passwords in a very short period of time, however, if the attempts per minute are limited, it thus becomes much harder and slower to crack.
In other words, if you’re holding a terrorists iPhone and need to know what’s on it then "your crack time just went from two days to two months".
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">FBI Forensic Examiner Stephen Flatley Calls Apple ‘Jerks’ and ‘Evil Geniuses’ for Encrypting iPhones <a href="https://t.co/PppR3NYl3I">https://t.co/PppR3NYl3I</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/mbrsrd?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mbrsrd</a> <a href="https://t.co/UuaIbdo1mC">pic.twitter.com/UuaIbdo1mC</a></p>— MacRumors.com (@MacRumors) <a href="https://twitter.com/MacRumors/status/951498479716544512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Source:
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fbi-brands-apple-apos-jerks-173253190.html