Apple: Terrorist's Apple ID Password Changed In Government Custody (buzzfeed.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the device, senior Apple executives said Friday. If that hadn't happened, Apple said, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible.

Had that password not been changed, the executives said, the government would not need to demand the company create a 'backdoor' to access the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who died in a shootout with law enforcement after a terror attack in California that killed 14 people. The Department of Justice filed a motion to compel the company to do that earlier Friday.

Comments

Re:Was this guy really a terrorist?

[He Who Has No Name]

There were two shooters, and they had documented terrorism involvement prior to this, once the investigation traced back far enough.

Most people don't bring their wives with them to help with "random and impulsive" workplace shootings, or set up a bomb factory in their garage weeks / months ahead of time.

Re:Well, THAT'S interesting.

[Jeremi]

which again leaves me wondering about the relevance of not being able to back it up to the cloud.

The idea was that they could bring the iPhone back into range of a WiFi network it already knows (e.g. the WiFi network at the terrorists' condo) and within a day or two it would do another automatic cloud backup.

Once that completed, Apple (and therefore the government) would have access to that backup, and therefore could try to break the backup's encryption via brute force without triggering the 10-attempt-failure auto-erase that is present on the phone.

However, since the password was changed, it seems that now the phone will be unable to initiate a backup without someone logging in to the phone first.