You all know how much I love my iPhone…I mean, I consider it the greatest invention since the wheel and if I could have it implanted in my skull, I would. I call it my “Brain Pal.”
Well, one thing I hadn’t really considered is the way in which the little life keeper could be exploited as an intelligence source — both for ill or good.
A Kit Up! tipster forwarded an interesting piece on how police officers are being trained to pull information on perps from smartphones – particularly the iPhone.
Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you’ve been, what you were doing there and whether you’ve got something to hide.
“Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone,” said Sam Brothers, a cell-phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.
“It may look like everything’s gone,” he said. “But for anybody who’s got a clue, retrieving that information is easy.”
There’s even a cottage industry for law enforcement to understand cracking Apple’s wonder device and a book on how to do it.
While the article focuses on how police and investigators can crack the phone for gouge on crooks, Kit Up! readers will probably be interested in flipping the concept on its head by considering how a bad guy might be able to find out a wealth of information about a military unit from the little bits of info contained on a trooper’s misplaced iPhone.
We wrote about how more and more troops in The Zone arejailbreaking their iPhones and using them on local networks — and with the explosion of apps that can be used for military ops, the iPhone will surely become a much more ubiquitous device on the battlefield. So it’s important to consider security of your iPhone while deployed.
One thing you can do to better secure your iPhone is to enable the password lock feature and couple it with a data erase modeafter some failed attempts at breaking in. While the passcode is only four digits long (which should be easy enough to crack for hardcore sleuths) it’s better than nothing.
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FYI…the iPhone Configuration Utility allows you you to better secure iPhones. It is very useful in a corporate environment in that you can setup a single "profile" then deploy it as needed. Same would apply to unit commanders. It also allows you to change the requirements of the passcode to include alphanumerics and change the min. length. I would highly recommend this to anyone with an iPhone who cares about their security. A word of caution, don't create a complex passcode then try to unlock your phone while driving.
Here are the links:
Windows: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL926
Mac: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL851
Stay safe!
You can enable an alphanumeric password on your iphone easily. google it.
What is interesting about this article is that it doesn't state that PDA phones, if you want to call them that, all store lots of data and all are capable of cracking. It leads me to believe it is probably another smear – especially considering that the Iphone is being used on missions… Wow, cut into the defense contracting budget, and keep Soldiers from getting the tools they want – instead of the tools contractors want to sell – well it is time to start making everyone fear using a phone they clearly like. The phone is popular and yes I have one along with another non-Iphone. It has it's ups and downs, but it is very intuitive. That is the problem with all the products sold to the military – they are not intuitive. Not enough smart people – the right kind of smart people – work in the DOD contracting business. I could name 20 years of digital systems that always lagged behind technology that was available to children. This will never change, and by the way, the Chinese, being we empowered them via wal-mart, can hack almost any phone that they make. If you want to know if they can hack it, read the made in China label, it is a dead give away..
One more reason not to have an i phone, or to place too much dependence on digital technology. Better to put your trust in cold steel.
Then get off the computer and go play with a steel beam. :)
Not a conspiracy theorist here but…….Stay off the grid as much as possible. Grocery stores are tracking what you buy. The USPS is tracking what you ship. The government and contracted agencies are using the internet, cell phones etc to monitor citizens. 1984 here we come!
You run out of meds? Or you think their putting GPS transmitters in your pills?
that is unbelievable!! this why i wont get the iPhone. i knew this day would eventually come.
I am not a lawbreaker or a scofflaw so law enforcement is not part of my life. I get along fine with my Net10 prepaid phone (I'll upgrade to a Samsung with MP3 and a camera soon, also Net10) so I am not concerned about all the Little Brothers out there bugging me. Take a break, get off the phone and texting which has made many Americans dumb and dumber, as in the Jim Carrey flick. I just a spent a week in the Sierra out of Independence, Calif without a phone and I met several backpackers who also were sans gadgets. Silence is Golden!
duuuuuuude, wassssssup
There are techniques that a forensic investigator or other reasonably skilled attacker can use to get around the iPhone passcode regardless of complexity. However this is not an iPhone-only issue, Android phones fare little better (see http://www.viaforensics.com for a good summary of the current "state of the art" on iPhone an Android recovery). Most other smartphones have similar vulnerabilities, e.g. if the attacker is skilled and reasonably resourced (we're not talking nation-state expertise here, just a good security techie) then most if not all data can be recovered. Blackberries fare better but are not invulnerable.
sometimes the degree gets in the way of what you can see!
Tech is both a blessing and curse. All the techies alive can’t retrieve information of something that doesn’t exist. Beastup has a small devise that basically (actually) destroys the device, in the most simple terms: the phone is literally smoked…but I’m pretty sure they don’t advertise it.