iPhone 5c Hacker Cellebrite Inches Closer To Hacking Into Apple’s iPhone 6

Israeli tech firm Cellebrite has offered to help an Italian father hack into a locked iPhone 6 handset that belonged to his deceased son. It's the same tech firm that assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation with hacking an iPhone 5c after Apple refused over fears that cracking its own security would leave hundreds of millions of iPhones vulnerable to attack.

Cellebrite was sympathetic to a story about Leondardo Fabbretti, who's 13-year-old son Dama, adopted from from Ethopia in 2007, passed away in September 2015 of bone cancer. Fabbretti wrote a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook asking for help with getting into the device so that he could extract photographs, videos, and anything else that might preserve the memory of his son.

iPhone 6

Apple's customer support was sympathetic to Fabbretti's situation, but ultimately said it couldn't help since Dama's information wasn't stored in iCloud. The only way to access any of Dama's data would be to hack the actual phone itself.

Fabbrett's story made headlines and drew the attention of Cellebrite, which is currently in the process of extracting the contents of Dama's iPhone 6 at no charge to the father.

"I just came back from their office in northern Italy. The meeting went well. They were able to download the directories with the iPhone's content, but there is still work to be done in order to access the files," Fabbretti told CNN.

It's not known how Cellebrite is defeating the security of Apple's iPhones, only that it's been successful with some mystery method specific to the iPhone 5c and now appears to be close to hacking an iPhone 6.