An obscure Japanese company, Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd., is the third party that helped the FBI and the U.S. government hacked the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter.
Cellebrite has just stumbled into the security business related to mobile phones by accident. It has built the company by concentrating on pinball games machines.
According to individuals who have knowledge of the matter, this little-known Japanese company worked with the FBI and was able to hack the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino terrorist.
But neither the FBI nor Cellbrite have confirmed the story. Sun Corp. Cellebrite's parent company which is based in a small town in the southwest of Tokyo, Japan, said on Thursday that the company cannot comment on specific criminal cases.
Before this project, Cellebrite has already worked with the FBI. Shares of Sun Corp climbed nearly 40 percent starting in March 21 when the U.S. government announced that it had used a third party to hack the contents of the concerned iPhone.
The successful hacking of the phone by this third party effectively ended the legal tussle between Apple and the FBI. It could have escalated all the way up to the Supreme Court if that didn't happen and would open a lot of legal precedence in matters of personal privacy.
Cellebrite's relationship with the FBI was first reported by Yedioth Ahronoth who is connected with an Israeli newspaper.
In 2007, Sun Corp of Japan acquired Cellebrite, an Israeli-based company. This company was mainly focused on phone-to-phone data transfer used by Sun's blooming telecommunications business. It has not yet ventured into forensic services during this time.
Later, Cellebrite served organizations like the FBI providing forensic services, according to Hidefumi Sugaya, Sun Corp spokesman. Currently, Cellebrite provides the majority of the mobile data solutions businesses of the Japanese parent company.
