FBI Paid Upwards of $1.3M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone

Is $1.3 million too much to access locked information on an iPhone? Not for FBI Director James Comey, who implied at a conference on Thursday, that his agency paid at least 1.3 million to an unidentified third party to break into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers last month.

At a security conference in London, Comey was asked how much the FBI paid to access the information. Although, Comey did not give hard numbers, he said the cost was, "more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months, for sure," according to the AP.

Reuters noted that Comey’s annual salary as of January 2015 was $183,300 citing figures from the FBI and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Without raises, Comey will make $1.34 million over the remainder of his time as FBI director.

There has been a lot of speculation about who the “outside party” is that helped the FBI access the locked information. Many reports implicated an Israeli mobile-forensics company, Cellebrite, in the weeks after.

Cellebrite declined to comment about the case in March. But the company did tell Forensic Magazine, last November, that the latest Apple iPhones and iOS programs were extremely difficult, if not impossible, to bypass.

According to Reuters, the $1.34 million would easily be the largest publicized fee ever paid for a hacking job—eclipsing the $1 million paid by the US company Zerodium to break into phones, they reported.

Comey added it was "worth it."

http://www.forensicmag.com/