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.

Read more: Backroom Trading of Phone Cracking Devices Is Sketchy As Hell

Motherboard verified the email addresses in the cache by attempting to create accounts on Cellebrite's customer login portal. In the majority of cases, this was not possible because the email address was already in use. A customer included in the data confirmed some of their details.

The dump also contains what appears to be evidence files from seized mobile phones, and logs from Cellebrite devices.

According to the hacker, and judging by timestamps on some of the files, some of the data may have been pulled from Cellebrite servers last year.

"Cellebrite recently experienced unauthorized access to an external web server," the company said in a statement on Thursday after Motherboard informed it of the breach.

"The company is conducting an investigation to determine the extent of the breach. The impacted server included a legacy database backup of my.Cellebrite, the company's end user license management system. The company had previously migrated to a new user accounts system. Presently, it is known that the information accessed includes basic contact information of users registered for alerts or notifications on Cellebrite products and hashed passwords for users who have not yet migrated to the new system," the statement continues.

Cellebrite advised customers to change their passwords as a precaution, and added that it is working with relevant authorities to assist in their investigation.

Access to Cellebrite's systems has been traded among a select few in IRC chat rooms, according to the hacker.

"To be honest, had it not been for the recent stance taken by Western governments no one would have known but us," the hacker told Motherboard. The hacker expressed disdain for recent changes in surveillance legislation.

In 2014 a hacker calling themselves "PhineasFisher" publicly released 40GB of data from surveillance company Gamma International. Gamma makes intrusion software that can remotely switch on a target's webcam, siphon off their emails, and much more. The following year, PhineasFisher targeted Italian company Hacking Team, and published a trove of emails and other internal documents from the company.

Although the terms of this Cellebrite breach are somewhat different—the hacker has not dumped the files online for anyone to download—similarities seem to remain, especially in the hacker's vigilante motivation.

The hacker, however, remained vague as to the true extent of what they had done to Cellebrite's systems.

"I can't say too much about what has been done," the hacker told Motherboard. "It's one thing to slap them, it's a very different thing to take pictures of [their] balls hanging out."

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</s>Cellebrite, a digital forensics firm known for helping law enforcement crack into locked smartphones, has itself fallen victim to hackers.

Technology news website Motherboard said Thursday that it had obtained 900 gigabytes of data related to the Israel-based company. It said the trove of data includes customer information, databases and technical data about the company's products.

Cellebrite released a statement Thursday acknowledging that one of its external web servers had been hacked, adding that that it's investigating the extent of the breach.

Data dump

Motherboard journalist Joseph Cox said that an unidentified hacker gave him 900 gigabytes of data from Cellebrite's servers.

In a series of messages posted to Twitter, he said that most of the data consisted of technical information, evidence and log files but that some of the information contained customer data. In an article , Cox wrote that the trove contained messages from authorities in Russia, Turkey and the Arab Gulf.

Cellebrite could be in for more unwelcome attention. Cox said that Motherboard would "likely be doing more stories from the data."

According to Cellebrite, the server in question included a database backup of an old license management system. It said the hackers accessed basic user contact information and encrypted passwords for users who had not yet moved to the company's new system.

While Cellebrite says it's not aware of any risk to customers as a result of the breach, it's still advising them to change their passwords.

Hacking the hackers

Cellebrite, founded in 1999, has contracts with the FBI dating back to at least 2013. The firm makes devices that allow law enforcement to extract and decode data such as contacts, pictures and text messages from more than 15,000 kinds of smartphones and other mobile devices. It also makes commercial products that companies can use to help their customers transfer data from old phones to new ones.

The company found itself in the spotlight last year after some industry observers speculated that it might have helped the FBI hack into an iPhone used by one of the killer in the San Bernardino, California, mass shooting. That phone was the subject of a major legal fight between the FBI and Apple; the company refused to help break iPhone security. The FBI dropped its case after finding another way into the phone.

Cellebrite claims to do business with thousands of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, militaries and governments in more than 100 countries. But its involvement in the San Bernardino case was never proven.</s>Israeli mobile forensics firm Cellebrite has announced that it has suffered a data breach following an unauthorized access to an external web server.

“The impacted server included a legacy database backup of my.Cellebrite, the company’s end user license management system. The company had previously migrated to a new user accounts system. Presently, it is known that the information accessed includes basic contact information of users registered for alerts or notifications on Cellebrite products and hashed passwords for users who have not yet migrated to the new system,” the company stated, and added that it is still investigating the attack.

They are also notifying affected customers, and advising them to change their passwords.

The confirmation comes a few hours after Motherboard released general information about 900 GB of data that they obtained and has supposedly been stolen from the firm.

“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,” the publication noted. “The dump also contains what appears to be evidence files from seized mobile phones, and logs from Cellebrite devices.”

The hacker that shared the data with the publication and is apparently behind the breach also noted that access to the compromised servers has been traded among hackers in IRC chat rooms, so it’s possible that other persons have exfiltrated potentially sensitive data.

“The Cellebrite breach shows that anyone can be hacked, even firms whose bread and butter is data exfiltration. And Cellebrite isn’t the first organization of this type to be targeted – Hacking Team and Gamma International have both experienced similar attacks by groups opposed to government surveillance,” Tony Gauda, CEO of ThinAir, commented for Help Net Security.

“While the 900 GB of data hasn’t been released publicly, it’s safe to assume that the information is highly sensitive. Besides customer information, the hackers managed to retrieve technical data, which could have serious repercussions if it were to fall into the wrong hands. Incidents such as this are the cyber equivalent of robbing a gun store, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the proprietary info stolen eventually made its way online. Demand for advanced hacking tools and techniques has never been higher and until these firms start securing their digital arsenals with technology capable of rendering data useless when it’s compromised, they will continue to find themselves in the crosshairs of hackers.”

Cellebrite’s name has become widely known after reports that the company has been asked for help to exfiltrate data from the locked iPhone belonging to Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.</s>On Thursday, Vice Motherboard reported that an unnamed source provided the site with 900GB of data hacked from Cellebrite, the well-known mobile phone data extraction company.

Among other products, Cellebrite's UFED system offers "in-depth physical, file system, password, and logical extractions of evidentiary data," and is often the go-to product for law enforcement to pull data from seized phones and other devices.

In a statement, Cellebrite called this hack "illegal" and noted that "the company is not aware of any specific increased risk to customers as a result of this incident; however, my.Cellebrite account holders are advised to change their passwords as a precaution."

In addition, the trove of materials contains “customer support tickets” showing that the Israeli company sells its services to countries with questionable human rights records, including Turkey, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Cellebrite’s own website shows that the company works with numerous local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the Hartford, Connecticut police to the North Wales police in the United Kingdom. (The company reportedly aided the FBI to unlock the seized San Bernardino iPhone that became the center of a protracted legal battle.)

However, little is known about the company’s business in many parts of the world.

This would not be the first time that a digital surveillance company sold to unsavory regimes. In 2015, data dumps from Hacking Team showed that it sold exploits to Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

Similarly, in 2014, documents leaked online showing that software created by the controversial UK-based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appeared to be located in the US, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain.</s>Imagine having complete visibility across your business to quantify exactly how and where resources are being used, so you are always ready to seize new opportunities.

In an age of data, this is not wishful thinking. We already have all the information. We just need to understand it.

The raw data exists, but most businesses have trouble interpreting it. They are unable to put their data into a context that can provide real businesses insights and objective outcomes, which limits decision-makers from making important business decisions.

There must be a cultural shift towards the importance of reading data and utilising the information at our fingertips for the best outcomes of the company. Just as reading and writing skills needed to move beyond scholars 100 years ago, data literacy will become one of the most important business skills for any member of staff.

But how will businesses make culture-wide data literacy become a reality? Here are my predictions for 2017 and beyond:

Data size will matter less in comparison to the insights gained from its collation. With more fragmentation of data and most of it created externally in the cloud, there will be a cost impact to hoarding data without a clear purpose. Businesses will have to quickly combine their big data with small data so they can gain insights and context to get value from it as quickly as possible. Combining data will reveal discrepencies, improve data accuracy as well as its understanding.

In 2017, hybrid cloud and multi-platform will emerge as the primary model for data analytics. Data has been shifting to the cloud – because of where data is generated, ease of getting started, and its ability to scale. One cloud is not enough, as the data and workloads won’t be in one platform. However, in an age of data protection, on-premise infrastructure will have long staying power, as organisations look to safeguard data. As a result, hybrid and multi-environment will emerge as the dominant model, meaning workloads and publishing will happen across cloud and on-premise.

Freemium has become the new standard, so 2017 will be the year users have easier access to their analytics. More and more data visualisation tools are available at low cost, or even for free, so some form of analytics will become accessible across the workforce. As analytics participation rates increase, so will data literacy rates naturally increase — more people will know what they’re looking at and what it means for their organisation. That means information activism will rise too.

User-driven data discovery has evolved into today’s enterprise-wide Business Intelligence (BI). In 2017, this will evolve to replace archaic reporting-first platforms. As modern BI becomes the new reference architecture, it will open more self-service data analysis to more people. It also puts different requirements on the back end for scale, performance, governance, and security.

In 2017, the focus will shift from “advanced analytics” to “advancing analytics.” Advanced analytics is critical, but the creation of the models, as well as the governance and curation of them, is dependent on highly-skilled experts. In addition, analytics can be advanced by increased intelligence being embedded into software, removing complexity and chaperoning insights. But the analytical journey shouldn’t be a black box or too prescriptive. Additionally, artificial intelligence will continue to play a vital role as an augmentation rather than replacement of human analysis because the right questions are just as important as the answers.

6. Visualisation on the whole information supply chain

Visualisation will become a strong component in unified hubs that take a visual approach to information asset management, as well as visual self-service data preparation, underpinning the actual visual analysis. Furthermore, progress will be made in having visualisation as a means to communicate our findings. The net effect of this is increased numbers of users doing more in the data supply chain.

Everyone won’t — and cannot be —both a producer and a consumer of apps. But they should be able to explore their own data. Data literacy will therefore benefit from analytics meeting people where they are, with applications developed to support them in their own context and situation, as well as the analytics tools we use when setting out to do some data analysis. As such, open, extensible tools that can be easily customised and contextualised by application and web developers will make further headway.

These trends lay the foundation for increased levels of not just information activism, but also data literacy. After all, new platforms and technologies that will be more accessible and normalised in work processes will help usher us into an era where the right data becomes connected with people and their ideas — that will close the chasm between the levels of data we have available and our ability to garner insights from it. Which, let’s face it, is what we need to put us on the path toward a more enlightened, information-driven, and fact-based era.

Sharryn Napier is the Vice President & Regional Director, Australia & NZ, with business intelligence software company Qlik.</s>CUPERTINO — Apple plans to expand manufacturing at a facility in an Arizona foreign-trade zone, making more servers there to supply its data centers in the Bay Area and across the United States, it said in a new regulatory filing.

The expansion plan in the foreign-trade zone in Mesa, Arizona could reduce its production costs for the servers. Foreign-trade zones provide relief from, or reductions for, tariffs and taxes that a company normally would pay to import items or components manufactured in other countries.

“Production under foreign-trade zone procedures could exempt Apple from customs duty payments,” on a variety of materials and components that would be used in the server assembly, Apple said in its federal register filing.

Apple intends to broaden its operations for final assembly of servers at the command center in Mesa.

The tech firm has been assembling the servers at each of its four data centers, which are located in the East Bay city of Newark; Prineville, Oregon; Maiden, North Carolina; and Reno, Nevada.

Apple uses these data centers to ensure that numerous Apple products and services operate properly, including iCloud, Apple Music, Siri and other well-known consumer services, the company said Tuesday.

Apple isn’t planning the expansion in order to placate President-elect Donald Trump, who has pressured U.S companies, including Apple, to manufacture more products in the United States.

“This is a logistical issue for Apple,” said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Campbell-based Creative Strategies, which tracks the tech sector. “It’s more efficient for Apple to make these in a single location rather than have that activity spread out all over the other data centers.”

The company’s new filing is an application to renew its ability to operate in Arizona’s foreign-trade zone. Apple initially obtained that permission when it took ownership of the manufacturing complex from former supplier GT Advanced Technologies.

Apple said the Arizona complex would serve as a Global Data Command Center for its four data facilities. It’s also possible the facility might have a secondary function as a data center at some point.

The new filing filled in some details, saying the Mesa manufacturing site will handle numerous materials and components. It said the dozens of items that could qualify for duty-free, or low duty fees, include: electric motors, printed circuit board assemblies, magnets, lithium batteries, routers and network switches, microphones, CDs, software, solid state drives, semiconductor media, monitors, electronic circuits, server rack rails, along with tape and plastic bags.

“Apple Inc. has re-purposed the site as a global data command center that will conduct high-tech manufacturing of finished data center cabinets for other data centers,” the city of Mesa stated in a document it filed in June.

The jobs at the center, which the company said would be in “the tens,” are likely to be high-skilled positions.

A notification issued by the city of Mesa said, “The proposed high-tech manufacturing is an expansion of Apple’s operations in the U.S. that will utilize personnel with extensive education and allow Apple to offer best-in-class data support.”</s>Chicago - Chicago Board Options Exchange has announced that its historical market data service, formerly operated by Market Data Express (MDX), migrated to CBOE Livevol Data Shop on January 6.

The consolidation of historical data services under the CBOE Livevol Data Shop umbrella aims to enhance the historical market data offerings currently available, and to broaden customizable services and reports available to subscribers. MDX will continue to offer real-time market data from CBOE and C2, as well as a real-time index data service.

CBOE Livevol Data Shop, a source for options, equity and exchange-traded fund (ETF) market data, enables customers to access quotes and trades on options and underlying equity security for the period from 2004 until the present. It provides subscribers with customized data sets and subscriptions to standardized daily, monthly and annual data packages.

With the consolidation of the two services, historical data on some products will now be available dating back to 1990, and product and timeframe parameters will be more customizable.

Additional information on CBOE Livevol Data Shop can be found at: https://datashop.cboe.com/ .</s>Across all of business there is a lot of interest in Big Data, Business Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, and other data related fields these days. Tools in these fields are particularly useful in the unconventional energy sector – they can help shale producers and servicers with everything from drilling more effective wells to responding to RFPs and maintaining infrastructure. Investors in the energy sector can make similar use of data to make more effective investment decisions.

This set of tools and techniques as a whole can be generically termed data analytics – and with major increases in computing power and software interfaces, 2017 may well be the biggest year yet for data analytics advances. Still for most novices in the field, there is a major misunderstanding around what data analytics can and cannot do.

To begin with all data analytics processes start with a basic truism – garbage in, garbage out. If the data being analyzed is not accurate and representative of the world, then it’s not useful. This concept seems simple, but it is often forgotten. For instance, in a risk management function, people often think of data as being useful for extrapolating the likelihood of future events – but that is only true if we have data where the events we are worried about are actually occurring with the same frequency that they do in the world. Related: U.S. Oil And Gas Jobs See First Gains In 2 Years

Take oil field servicers responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for example – we can use a statistical model called a probit model to figure out the probability of a particular RFP being awarded given a variety of characteristics such as the servicer’s price, size, and competitive atmosphere. In order to model that effectively, we need to have data on the customer and the competitive market – size, profitability, industry, assets, etc . Once we have that data, we can figure out the likelihood of our bid being accepted given the prevailing situation in the industry. Equally importantly, data analysis can tell us statistically how confident we are in that outcome. In other words, we might be 82% sure that company XYZ would get a contract, while we are only 13% sure that firm ABC would get the award.

Yet in order to build this type of model, we need to have the right underlying data – that means having the right data on the firm, and having the right data on past deals that have occurred over a long period of time. In other words, building a data model requires investment of time and money – it is not a simple one-off process in many cases. Data analytics is powerful but only if we have the right tool for the job. Many industry insiders say that the single biggest problem that is holding back effective use of new data-related tools and technologies is the lack of data.

The second major issue with data analytics is that we need data which is properly cleaned and compiled. Most of the time the data used for analysis comes from different sources, some of which are high quality and others of which are low quality. That means that the datasets have to be cleaned and merged together into a single larger database. This is difficult and time consuming in many cases, especially with large datasets such as those used in the energy sector. Related: Oil Prices Running Out Of Reasons To Rally

Investors in the energy sector may have a slightly easier time getting data, though there is often a cost to do so, and a single database by itself is rarely all that useful.

For instance, when trying to forecast future oil demand and shortfalls in a particular region, one needs to use data on demand which come from one source, data on existing stockpiles which come from a second source, and data on characteristics of producers which comes from a third source. The three sets of data have to all be merged together based on a single unifying factor like date of the returns. Once this is done, the data have to be cleaned to deal with issues like oil producers that close up shop, or bid-ask bounce in commodities pricing. When you get done with this process, you have a formula that allows you to make forecasts about oil pricing in particular regions – but again it requires time and investment to get accurate results.

In the energy sector, as in so many other industries there is often an element of institutional inertia which leads to less interest in new ideas. Those who do embrace new tech like data analytics early on are likely to be the ones that see the most benefit though. The key to such efforts though is investing in new data analytics capacity as a process rather than thinking of it as a one-time effort.
• None World Bank: Trump To Boost U.S. Economic Growth And Commodities
• None Oil Slips And Bounces Back After EIA Reports Significant Builds Across The Board</s>Talend, the big data integration vendor that went public last July, announced its winter release today with new tools to help automate data preparation, a sticky problem for enterprise customers.

Surely, there are ever-increasing amounts of data and companies struggle to keep up. There aren’t enough data scientists in the world to fill the need. It requires software to pick up some of the slack and companies like Talend are hoping to help customers process that data — and eventually write applications to help customer create more data-driven businesses.

Perhaps that explains why, when Talend went public last summer, its shares popped 54 percent out of the gate and closed at $25.50. The company’s stock price has stayed close to that price ever since, fluctuating as stocks do, but sitting at $23.79 at close of business yesterday. Clearly, there is a demand for these kinds of services and companies are hungry for solutions to help them out of the data morass.

From its inception, Talend’s primary job has been to provide an interface to create clean Hadoop code, removing the need to hand-code everything. The company has tried to simplify this process by providing an interface to manage the data and create Hadoop-compatible code, across a variety of releases — whether that’s Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR or Amazon EMR, Amazon’s Hadoop processing service.

In the latest version, they want to take that a step further, says Ray Christopher, Talend’s product marketing manager. The new release attempts to deal with a couple of problems that have plagued companies trying to process the growing data pile.

One of the issues of dealing with new data is ensuring that it is in a proper state for whatever application you wish to create. When data is coming from a variety of internal and external sources, that can be problematic. It needs to have a common vocabulary and that cleansing can be time-consuming and pain-staking work.

As Christopher and others have said, data scientists often spend a vast majority of their time just getting the data ready. The new Talend Data Preparation app lets customers create a common dictionary, and using machine learning, helps automate the data cleansing process, with the goal of reducing the time it takes to get data into a ready state. While data is messy and sometimes defies automation techniques, this should provide a good head start if it works as described.

The other issue, related to getting data prepared, is verifying the quality of that data, and the new Talend Stewardship app has been designed to “crowd source” data quality by bringing in the line of business experts to help. The tool lets admins set up a data cleansing campaign where users can go in and point to data to certify data sets, or put them aside if they see a problem. There is a full audit trail to track and review the activity, so that there are checks and balances built in.

The new tools will be available a week from today and existing customers get a deal — two free license for each new tool, should they decide to upgrade.</s>Everything is compromised. In the latest case of a hacking company being hacked, Israel's Cellebrite is the latest to have its internal data hauled off by hackers. Joseph Cox of Motherboard was given inside details by the crew that claims to have spirited away login info and other data from the cell phone-cracking company.

Included in the data haul are some other nifty surprises: evidence files from forensic searches of cell phones and logs from Cellebrite devices.

Cellebrite is a major supplier to US law enforcement, as well as to government agencies in countries with sketchier human rights records like Turkey, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. In many ways, the company is similar to Italy's Hacking Team, which found itself hacked and its emailed dirty laundry aired by enterprising hackers unimpressed by the company's malleable morality.

What's truly interesting about this hack (and those similar to it) is that they go right to the heart of what's wrong with the DOJ's insistence that any "one-time" phone crack -- like the one they pursued in the San Bernardino mass shooting case -- would be safe as houses in the government's hands.

Riana Pfefferkorn -- who helped write an amicus brief on Apple's behalf (along with several other security researchers and professors) -- pointed out on Twitter that Cellebrite's hacking is exactly the sort of risk the government refused to seriously contemplate during its pursuit of an All Writs Order forcing Apple to open up the phone for the FBI.

If such a hack were created by Apple in response to a court order, there's no way for the FBI, Apple, or anyone else to plausibly claim it would be kept out of the hands of malicious actors. Companies in the business of breaking into devices aren't impervious to outside attacks. Neither is the US government, which has proven consistently weak when it comes to securing the massive amount of personally-identifiable information it collects from US citizens.

So far, the collected files haven't been shown to anyone but a few journalists, but Cox points out unauthorized access to Cellebrite isn't exactly a new thing.

Access to Cellebrite's systems has been traded among a select few in IRC chat rooms, according to the hacker. “To be honest, had it not been for the recent stance taken by Western governments no one would have known but us,” the hacker told Motherboard. The hacker expressed disdain for recent changes in surveillance legislation.

Cellebrite's response to the hack is to claim that the only thing affected was a legacy server for end user licenses. Customers are being encouraged to change their passwords, but that comes a little too late to do much good. That license server may be the only thing breached through unauthorized means, but the log files and obtained evidence the hackers appear to have could easily have been taken out of the front end with compromised credentials.

The underlying fact is this: breaking protections like encryption or purchasing exploits to defeat it is something the FBI and other law enforcement entities will continue to advocate for, even while aware that it's impossible to claim definitively that the tools used won't be hijacked by someone else with more malicious motives. The Shadow Brokers' heist of NSA exploits shows that even if the government takes steps to protect what it has stored on its own servers, it can't prevent a disgruntled analyst from leaving a blackhat toolbag behind for others to find once a surveillance job is finished.
Cellebrite, a data extraction company used by U.S. law enforcement, is hacked leaking 900 GB of confidential data from its servers.