奇速英语

美国联邦调查局破译苹果手机

The FBI announced on Monday that it had successfully hacked into an iPhone used by a gunman responsible for a mass shooting in California. The announcement left tech giant Apple Inc. wondering about the security of one of its key products.

On December 2, 2015, Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people and wounded 22 others in San Bernardino, California. Farook and Malik were killed in a shootout with police a few hours after the attack. The next day, an FBI team found Farook’s iPhone 5c in the car parked outside the couple’s home in Redlands, California. When investigators turned on the device, it asked them to enter a four-digit pass code. The phone was set to erase all of its data after 10 incorrect guesses. Not even Apple, the company that made the phone, had the code. The FBI asked Apple to help them get access to the information stored in the phone.

In a statement, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that people store “an incredible amount of personal information” on their iPhones. “That information,” he said, “needs to be protected from hackers and criminals who want to access it, steal it, and use it without our knowledge or permission … While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products.”

On March 21, the FBI announced that an “outside party” had come forward with a possible way to break into the phone. Now, having confirmed that the code has been cracked, the FBI has dropped the legal battle with Apple. The agency is reviewing information on the device, but has not yet revealed(透露) whether there is anything useful stored on the phone. In response, Apple promised to increase the security of its products.

While the standoff between the FBI and Apple seems to have ended, it has sparked concern about the issue of security over privacy. “The FBI and Apple have a common goal here: to keep people safe and secure,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “This is the FBI prioritizing an investigation over the interests of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.”