“We must focus on phones used by criminals”

Jun 13, 2016 10:26 GMT  ·  By

The San Bernardino iPhone saga is more or less over, and now that the tension between Apple and the FBI in this case has loosened up a little bit, more information on why the feds had to turn to third parties to break into the device emerges.

NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett has recently revealed at a conference that the agency needs to prioritize investments in devices that are primarily popular among criminals, and not on those popular in the consumer market.

In the San Bernardino case, the terrorist used an iPhone 5c, which the agency considers rather “unpopular” for criminals, although the FBI previously stated that more illegal activities were performed with iPhones because of their strong encryption.

But Ledgett told the audience that the NSA couldn’t invest in hacking every single model on the market because that would be extremely expensive, especially given the opposition from manufacturers in the United States.

Apple working on hacker-proof iPhone

Apple was asked by the FBI to help break into the iPhone used by the San Bernardino attacker, but the company refused on grounds of privacy violation, claiming that creating a backdoor to access data stored on the device would only lead to additional risks for Americans. The dispute eventually moved to the court, where the judge first ruled in favor of the FBI, but Apple appealed the decision and continued to stand by its claims.

The FBI eventually managed to hack the device with help from a third-party, which was believed to be a group of hackers collaborating with the US government in several cases and which was aware of an unpatched vulnerability in iOS. Little was said about the way the iPhone was hacked, as the FBI refused to disclose the method to Apple and warned that the same software could be used to break into other devices should they be involved in criminal investigations.

Right now, however, Apple is believed to be working on a hacker-proof iPhone that would be impossible to break into even by the FBI and other hacker groups of security firms, but such information is yet to be confirmed by a source within the company.