The IT Nerd

Meet GrayShift. This is a new company that promises to crack any iPhone. Even ones running the latest version of iOS for a relatively cheap price. And it’s apparently run by an ex-Apple security engineer. Here’s what Motherboard had to say about this:

In a sign of how hacking technology often trickles down from more well-funded federal agencies to local bodies, at least one regional police department has already signed up for GrayShift’s services, according to documents and emails obtained by Motherboard. As Forbes reported on Monday, GrayShift is an American company which appears to be run by an ex-Apple security engineer and others who have long held contracts with intelligence agencies. In its marketing materials, GrayShift offers a tool called GrayKey, an offline version of which costs $30,000 and comes with an unlimited number of uses. For $15,000, customers can instead buy the online version, which grants 300 iPhones unlocks.

This is what the Indiana State Police bought, judging by a purchase order obtained by Motherboard. The document, dated February 21, is for one GrayKey unit costing $500, and a “GrayKey annual license — online — 300 uses,” for $14,500. The order, and an accompanying request for quotation, indicate the unlocking service was intended for Indiana State Police’s cybercrime department. A quotation document emblazoned with GrayShift’s logo shows the company gave Indiana State Police a $500 dollar discount for their first year of the service. Importantly, according to the marketing material cited by Forbes, GrayKey can unlock iPhones running modern versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, such as iOS 10 and 11, as well as the most up to date Apple hardware, like the iPhone 8 and X.

It’s an interesting business model which brings this tech to the masses as relatively low prices. But I have to assume that the guy who runs this operation must be violating any employment or non-disclosure agreement that he had with Apple. Thus I wonder how long before Apple sues him and this company out of existence? On top of that, I wonder how you prove that this stuff actually works as advertised, rather than being smoke and mirrors. Besides, Apple is likely to reverse engineer how this works and create countermeasures against it. Thus assuming that this works at all, it may only work for a few months seeing as iPhone users update their OSes far faster than those over on Team Android.

This entry was posted on March 9, 2018 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.