iOS PIN Cracking Video

This short video shows how easy it can be to crack the PIN from a stolen device.

…and why keeping your organisation’s hardware up to date is so important.

We’re going to be showing you a hardware crack for the iPhone, to crack the PIN from a stolen device. In this case we’ll be using a commercial tool, the Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit. Its commercial, you have to pay for it and you may have to demonstrate that you’re involved in forensics, which we are.

There are also freeware tools, for example the iphone-dataprotection suite, a rather ironic name for it really. That is free but you have to build your RAM disk every time. Using this Elcomsoft suite its easier to do, a much more point and click exercise.

It is restricted by hardware versions though. As you can see it only goes up to the iPhone version 4 and the iPad first generation. It is quite limited but it does show you how important it is to keep your hardware version bang up to date. If you’ve any iPad 1s in your organisations, or any iPhone 4s NOT 4Ss, then you have potential problems if devices are stolen.

So, we’ve put the iPhone into DFU mode or Device Firmware Update mode. That involves a particular sequence of button presses, you can find out how online, its easy to do. We’ve now got the point where we’re ready to go, and we’re going for the item number 14, as we’ve got an iPhone 4 GSM here. So, we start that running and off we go…

…there we are, its now uploading a RAM disk and going to create a custom boot ROM for us. You can now see we’re running the Elcomsoft RAM disk so lets move on. We’ve got several options here, the one we really want is getting the passcodes. That’s option 6, and very straightforward to continue with our pass crack.

Within 13 seconds we got the PIN. Obviously that was a relatively easy PIN, low down the number cycle “1980”. This is why its so important to keep your iOS hardware up to date. If you’ve got an iPhone 4 or iPad 1 and it gets nicked, you’ve got problems.