Secret's Out: New Details on How FBI Hacked Into iPhone

The FBI is not sharing its hacking secret with Apple after they successfully accessed the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernadino killers, the Los Angeles Times reports.
 
The news is a setback for Apple Inc., as consumers learned that they can't keep the government out of an encrypted device that U.S. officials had claimed was impossible to crack.

Apple software engineers and outside experts remain in the dark about how the FBI broke the digital locks on the phone without the tech giant's help.

The Justice Department's announcement that it was dropping a legal fight to compel Apple to help it access the phone also took away any obvious legal avenues Apple might have used to learn how the FBI did it, reports the Associated Press.

The FBI said it used a mysterious method to get into the iPhone, but new clues have emerged indicating how they may have accessed the device.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the agency used software to run through potential codes until it cracked the correct one.

The FBI managed to defeat an Apple security feature that threatened to delete the phone's contents if the FBI failed to enter the correct passcode combination after 10 tries.

This allowed the government to repeatedly and continuously test passcodes in what's known as a brute-force attack until the right code is entered and the phone is unlocked.

FBI Director James Comey has said with those features removed, the FBI could break into the phone in 26 minutes.

It is not clear what information was gathered after the phone was hacked.