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It took just 40 minutes for the FBI to break into a cell phone owned by the man who authorities say carried out the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on July 13, Bloomberg reported.
The shooter—identified by authorities as Thomas Matthew Crooks—killed one attendee at the rally, and wounded Trump and two others before being killed by a Secret Service agent.
According to Bloomberg, FBI agents seeking to crack his cell phone turned to software developed by Cellebrite, an Israeli firm that specializes in exploiting flaws in cell phone encryption. The FBI’s initial attempt to crack the suspect’s phone using Cellebrite software at its Pittsburgh office was unsuccessful, Bloomberg reported, as Crooks owned a newer Samsung device that was apparently beyond the software’s capabilities.
FBI agents then reportedly transferred the device to the agency’s main forensics lab in Quantico, Virginia, and sought assistance from Cellebrite, which provided additional technical expertise and a development build of their phone-cracking software.
404 Media recently reported it had acquired internal Cellebrite documents from April 2024 indicating the digital forensics company has classified all iPhones running iOS version 17.4 or later with the “In Research” status. The documents also indicated Cellebrite “fully supported” Android 14, released in October 2023, although with some gaps in specific devices.
The newer version of the software took around 40 minutes to break past the device’s security features, Bloomberg reported. The phone reportedly contained details on Crooks’s last internet searches, text messages from his parents, and photos of various politicians, but as of July 25 authorities have not yet disclosed if the search yielded any particular insights into his motivation.
Cracking the encryption on modern cell phones can take anywhere from hours to months depending on factors like the sophistication of the phone’s security features, the length and complexity of the encryption key, and whether or not the device has any known hardware or software flaws. Numerous police departments across the country have reportedly purchased access to phone-cracking tools.
There’s a hot market for zero-day vulnerabilities and other exploits in modern cell phones, with forensics firms often racing against companies like Apple to discover security holes before they’re patched. According to the Intercept, Cellebrite has a robust reverse engineering unit that works to discover such flaws and receives pre-release versions of phones in testing from some manufacturers, but in some cases, the firm only allows its own staff to execute its most advanced methods.