According to a report in the Washington Post, the FBI purchased a zero-day exploit to crack the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone.
Citing sources “familiar with the matter”, the paper said FBI did not need the services of Cellebrite, an Israeli cyber-security company, after all.
The FBI reportedly purchased the zero-day exploit from professional hackers who some have categorised as “grey hats”.
The flaw was used to extract information from the phone which was then used to create hardware that the FBI used to crack the security code on the phone without triggering any of the security features.
FBI director James Comey has stated that the exploit only works on iPhone 5Cs running iOS 9. There is a debate within the US government about revealing the exploit to Apple to enable the company to patch it.
Meanwhile, an Italian father, who wants to unlock his dead son's iPhone 6, has given the phone to Cellebrite engineers who say they have extracted the data from the phone onto their servers and are now working on breaking the encryption.
