Updated Thursday March 29 9 a.m. ET: Micro Systemation has removed the original video which made headlines around the Internet.
Security experts and the journalists who cover them can spend all day telling people they should password-protect their smartphones, but once in a while something scary comes along that makes them throw up their hands in frustration.
A video posted on YouTube by Swedish mobile forensics company Micro Systemation A.B. (MSAB) was one of those things.
In it, an unseen narrator using MSAB's latest product quickly and methodically determines an iPhone 4's passcode, extracts all the phone's data, views SMS messages, checks out recent Google Maps locations and goes over recent user activity, including the passcode crack.
The narrator, MSAB's British director of marketing, Mike Dickinson, then does the same to an Android phone. He even gets a list of all the wireless hotspots the Android phone is set to automatically connect to — along with their passwords.
"After 20 years or so, people understand they shouldn't do naughty things on their personal computers, but they still don't understand that about phones," Dickinson told Forbes' Andy Greenberg. "From an evidential point of view, it's of tremendous value — if they've done something wrong."
MSAB's product, XRY, comes in various iterations, some software only, others including a toolkit and a specialized USB hub. Its customers are law-enforcement agencies and military forces throughout the world, and Dickinson said the company's largest client is the U.S. military.
Thankfully, the company won't sell XRY to just anyone. Before you can buy it, you've got to contact the company and agree to have your identity verified.
While the hacks in the video go very smoothly, Dickinson admitted to Greenberg that longer passcodes and passwords can be much more difficult to crack.
"In some cases, it takes so long to brute-force that it's not worth doing it," he said.
UPDATE: Micro Systemation has pulled the video in question from YouTube. Here's a different video that details what XRY can do, but doesn't show it in action.
