Mysterious $15,000 'GrayKey' Promises To Unlock iPhone X For The Feds (forbes.com)

Thomas Fox-Brewster, reporting for Forbes: Just a week after Forbes reported on the claim of Israeli U.S. government manufacturer Cellebrite that it could unlock the latest Apple iPhone models, another service has emerged promising much the same. Except this time it comes from an unkown entity, an obscure American startup named Grayshift, which appears to be run by long-time U.S. intelligence agency contractors and an ex-Apple security engineer. In recent weeks, its marketing materials have been disseminated around private online police and forensics groups, offering a $15,000 iPhone unlock tool named GrayKey, which permits 300 uses. That's for the online mode that requires constant connectivity at the customer end, whilst an offline version costs $30,000. The latter comes with unlimited uses. Another ad showed Grayshift claiming to be able to unlock iPhones running iOS 10 and 11, with iOS 9 support coming soon. It also claims to work on the latest Apple hardware, up to the iPhone 8 and X models released just last year. In a post from one private Google group, handed to Forbes by a source who asked to remain anonymous, the writer indicated they'd been demoed the technology and that it had opened an iPhone X.

Comments

Re:Let the arms race begin!

[Anonymous Coward]

No. "Popcorn" has been removed by Apple from the AppStore.

Re:DMCA?

[mark-t]

It'll suck for the people who spent the $15k or $30k on the product, only to have it stop working not long afterwards.

I'd hopw that $15k/$30k would include upgrades for a long enough time to be worthwhile, otherwise it's a money sink.

Should be considered treason.

[thedarb]

This is completely against the publics own interest and should be considered treason, IMHO.

Re:Should be considered treason.

[rogoshen1]

Despite all the high tech weapons and whatnot, any kind of sustained operation still relies on boots on the ground. And I think you'd be surprised at how quickly the desertion rate would approach 100% if something like that came to pass -- the brainwashing of rank and file grunts is not *that* .. effective

Also, notice how hard of a time the US has had in pacifying places like Iraq or Afghanistan. It turns out large scale guerrilla-type conflicts are very hard for the US military to handle in a sustained fashion.

It would be a brutal and painful civil war -- and only a completely base and vile person would hope for it.

Re:Arrest them for DMCA violation

[volodymyrbiryuk]

You know very well that it applies only to ordinary civilians.