Quartz, writing about a black box you connect to a cracked open iPhone:

The hacking equipment is called IP Box, and can be found on eBay for about $200. It’s a black box that connects to an iPhone and systematically runs through every possible PIN combination to unlock it.

And:

Cleverly, IP Box gets around Apple’s auto-erase feature by cutting power to the device after each failed attempt. This means the wrong guesses don’t accumulate, opening the door for brute-force hacks, according to an analysis by British security consultancy MDSec. The firm used IP Box to successfully unlock an iPhone 5s running iOS 8.1 protected by a four-digit PIN in March 2015.

The San Bernardino iPhone 5c was running iOS 8.1.2. Can this technique be used to break into 8.1.2?

There is confusion over which versions of iOS IP Box is able to unlock in this way. Dominic Chell, who runs MDSec, says Apple plugged the security hole after iOS 8.1. But a US government agent has testified that the hack works on later versions of iOS, too.

The testimony surfaced in a New York court case in December 2015, when a ruling referred to a Department of Homeland Security special agent named David Bauer who told a court that he had unlocked three phones with IP Box. The target phone in the case in question, though, was an iPhone 5 running iOS 8.1.2, which Bauer had not personally unlocked before. He said, however, that law enforcement agents in Bergen County, New Jersey, had successfully unlocked iPhones running later versions of iOS.

It’d be pretty easy to tell if the FBI had tried this technique, since it requires you to crack open the phone to access the leads from the battery.

As of last week (Feb 22), Apple reports that 23% of active iPhones are running iOS 8 or earlier.

Here’s a link to the MDSec blog, where you can see these hacking tools in action. Fascinating stuff.