Criminals like Apple iPhones because of encryption — Police

Some criminals have switched to new iPhones as their “device of choice” to commit wrongdoing due to strong encryption Apple Inc has placed on their products, three law enforcement groups said in a court filing.

The groups told a judge overseeing Apple’s battle with the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday that, among other things, they were aware of “numerous instances” in which criminals who previously used so-called throwaway burner phones had switched to iPhones. They did not list a specific instance.

The brief by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association and two others also cited a jailhouse phone call intercepted by New York authorities in 2015, in which an inmate called Apple’s encrypted operating system a “gift from God.”

The government obtained a court order last month requiring Apple to write new software to disable passcode protection and allow access to an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the December killings in San Bernardino, California.

Apple asked that the order be vacated, arguing such a move would set a dangerous precedent and threaten customer security.

Tech industry leaders including Google, Facebook and Microsoft and more than two dozen other companies filed legal briefs on Thursday supporting Apple. The Justice Department received support from law enforcement groups and six relatives of San Bernardino victims.

The law enforcement groups said in their brief that Apple’s stance poses a grave threat to investigations across the country.

The FBI says Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were inspired by Islamist militants when they shot and killed 14 people on Dec. 2 at a holiday party. The couple later died in a shootout with police and the FBI said it wants to read the data on Farook’s work phone to investigate any links with militant groups.

In a filing on Thursday, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office said at least two 911 calls from the time of the shooting reported three assailants, not two.

Even though those reports were “not corroborated,” if in fact there were three attackers it would be important to crack open the iPhone “to identify as of yet unknown co-conspirators,” the District Attorney’s filing stated.

Apple has said it respects the FBI and has cooperated by turning over data in its possession.

The latest request is different, Apple says, because it requires them to crack a phone with a software tool that does not currently exist.

source: interaksyon.com

US Energy Department hacked, says no classified data was compromised

WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy’s electronics network was attacked by hackers in mid-January but no classified data was compromised, the agency said in a letter to employees.

The attack “resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of employee and contractor Personally Identifiable Information,” the Energy Department said in the letter, which was received by employees at its headquarters in Washington late on Friday and obtained by Reuters on Monday.

The department said it was working with federal law enforcement to gather more information on the nature and scope of the attacks and assess the potential impact on staff and contractors. “Based on the findings of this investigation, no classified data was compromised,” the letter said.

Government agencies are required to disclose details when confidential personal data has been hacked. But there are no laws requiring them to disclose information when classified data is raided by hackers.

It was not clear which divisions at the agency’s headquarters were breached in the attack, and it was also uncertain who the hackers were or where they were based.

A department spokesman declined to comment, and a spokesman for the Energy Information Administration, which publishes data that helps keep oil, gas and electricity markets stable, deferred to DOE headquarters.

Government agencies and contractors handling classified information are supposed to use special safeguards to protect classified information from disclosure.

The most highly classified information, such as intelligence information, is supposed to be stored on systems that are completely isolated from the Internet.

Over the years, flaws in the systems for handling classified information have emerged, however. In the past, Energy Department installations that design and build nuclear weapons, including the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, have faced scandals over alleged mishandling of classified information.

In 2006, for example, after raiding a house trailer containing a suspected small methamphetamine lab, local police found three computer memory sticks containing classified information downloaded from the Los Alamos lab’s computers.

One of the largest security scandals in modern U.S. history, the leaking of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and military reports to the website WikiLeaks, allegedly occurred because, in an effort to share intelligence more widely with operations in the field, agencies sent classified reports electronically to battlefield intelligence units, where data protection measures were lax.

Among the material obtained by WikiLeaks, however, not a single document that has surfaced to date was classified higher than “secret” – a fairly low-grade classification. Intelligence officials were not particularly alarmed by the WikiLeaks leaks because none of their truly sensitive material was leaked.

In late 1999, a Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist born in Taiwan, Wen Ho Lee, was arrested and indicted for allegedly mishandling classified information from the lab. However, prosecutors ultimately dropped all but one charge against him, to which he pleaded guilty, and the case ended with Lee receiving settlement payments from the government and some news organizations.

The Energy Department said in its letter that it was increasing monitoring across its networks and deploying tools to protect sensitive assets.

source: interaksyon.com