Cellebrite inked a deal with the FBI to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c after Apple told a court that it knew no other way to crack its iPhone without writing a special back-doored operating system.

Cellebrite has contracts with the FBI dating back to 2014, Associated Press says, but also commercial products that can be used to transfer data from older phones to new ones. Apple uses Cellebrite devices in some of its stores, the report says.

The outfit has deemed dubbed “shadowy” by the Tame Apple Press, but it is starting to seem stranger and stranger that Apple had never heard of any method of by-passing its security before now. After all how shadowy is a company that works with Apple. Cellebrite says its commercial software works on iPhones running older operating systems including iOS 8. The San Bernardino iPhone runs iOS9, but the outfit has tools that could be used to crack Apple’s latest operating system.

It seems that some of the Tame Apple Press are just starting to wake up to the fact that there is a whole industry out there dedicated to knocking over iPhones.
The Washington Post noted that the mobile forensics is now a booming business, with the global digital forensics market worth $2 billion in 2014. That figure is estimated to climb to almost $5 billion by 2021, according to a mid-February study from Transparency Market Research.

Cellebrite has contracts with the FBI dating back to 2014, Associated Press says, but also commercial products that can be used to transfer data from older phones to new ones. Apple uses Cellebrite devices in some of its stores, the report says.