This is part of an ongoing Motherboard series on the proliferation of phone cracking technology, the people behind it, and who is buying it. Follow along here.The hackers have been hacked. Motherboard has obtained 900 GB of data related to Cellebrite, one of the most popular companies in the mobile phone hacking industry. The cache includes customer information, databases, and a vast amount of technical data regarding Cellebrite's products.The breach is the latest chapter in a growing trend of hackers taking matters into their own hands, and stealing information from companies that specialize in surveillance or hacking technologies.Cellebrite is an Israeli company whose main product, a typically laptop-sized device called the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), can rip data from thousands of different models of mobile phones. That data can include SMS messages, emails, call logs, and much more, as long as the UFED user is in physical possession of the phone.Cellebrite is popular with US federal and state law enforcement, and, according to the hacked data, possibly also with authoritarian regimes such as Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey.The data appears to have been taken, at least in part, from servers related to Cellebrite's website. The cache includes alleged usernames and passwords for logging into Cellebrite databases connected to the company's my.cellebrite domain. This section of the site is used by customers to, among other things, access new software versions.A hacker provided Motherboard with a large cache of customer information, databases, and more.Continue reading on Motherboard.
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