[Infowarrior] - San Bernardino DA says seized iPhone may hold “dormant cyber pathogen”

[Richard Forno]

OFFFS.

San Bernardino DA says seized iPhone may hold “dormant cyber pathogen”

by David Kravets - Mar 3, 2016 9:28pm EST

He says iPhone might be "a weapon" to trigger some nefarious worm of some sort.

The San Bernardino District Attorney told a federal judge late Thursday that Apple must assist the authorities in unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino shooters that killed 14 people in a killing rampage in December. The phone, which was a county work phone issued to Farook as part of his Health Department duties, may have been the trigger to unleash a "cyber pathogen," county prosecutors said in a brief court filing.

"The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have connected to the San Bernardino County computer network. The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino's infrastructure," according to a court filing (PDF) by Michael Ramos, the San Bernardino County District Attorney.

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Jonathan Zdziarski, a prominent iPhone forensics expert, said in a telephone interview that the district attorney is suggesting that a "magical unicorn might exist on this phone."

"The world has never seen what he is describing coming from an iPhone," Zdziarski said. "I would expect, I would demand, in order to make that statement at all, he should make some kind of proof."

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In a follow-up e-mail, Zdziarski added: "This reads as an amicus designed to mislead the courts into acting irrationally in an attempt to manipulate a decision in the FB'Is favor. It offers no evidence whatsoever that the device has, or even might have, malware on it. It offers no evidence that their network was ever compromised. They are essentially saying that a magical unicorn might exist on this phone."

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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/san-bernardino-da-says-seized-iphone-may-hold-dormant-cyber-pathogen/

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