A low-profile company that’s involved in some of the nation’s top forensic investigations is testing a robotic arm to unlock the most common mobile phones used in crimes.
Irvine-based Susteen Inc. executives recently went to Washington, D.C., for closed meetings with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and other top law enforcement departments to showcase the device and related software that it says can break into “burner,” or cheap throwaway phones, in less than 24 hours.
The top-security demonstrations of the Burner Breaker followed visits to the Silicon Valley Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory in Menlo Park and the Southern California High Tech Task Force in Los Angeles, which represent or serve consortiums of law enforcement agencies in the area.
“Everyone talks about Androids. Everyone talks about iPhones. What people forget is that most of your crooks, drug dealers, gangs, are all using burner phones,” said Jeremy Kirby, Susteen’s director of sales and grant coordinator. “Up until now, no one has been able to break into them.”
The primary reason: simplicity.
Prepaid throwaway phones, which were used in the November Paris and Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lack smart features that allow other devices to communicate with them. Essentially, they have no mobile brains, so they can’t sync with scanning software that extracts, stores and transmits data.
The Burner Breaker accesses proprietary software loaded with a database of hundreds of devices and specifications, such as screen length and width, and utilizes sensor technology to determine changes in screen brightness, idle time, or exact button pressure points, for instance.
The software understands button locations and the length to wait between access attempts so that the phone doesn’t go into sleep mode and thereby block entry. It programs the information, along with other data, into the robotic arm.
The device is promoted as the only one that can input lowercase and uppercase passwords. Susteen’s software rifles through the thousand most commonly used passwords and emulates typical swipes such as X’s, S’s or lightning bolts that consumers use to unlock their phones.
Internal studies show that 88% of mobile phone consumers use the same 250 line movements to access devices.
Susteen contends it can break into any throwaway phone with a four-digit password in 17 hours and can unlock a six-digit pin in a few days. The average phone takes six hours to crack, according to Kirby.
The company, which is on the front line of the national privacy debate on accessing phone records, wouldn’t disclose if the FBI contacted it to unlock the iPhone 5C used by San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook.
“We can’t comment on specific cases, but we are constantly in contact with most agencies about major mobile forensic cases,” Kirby told the Business Journal.
Israel-based competitor Cellebrite Ltd. has been widely linked to helping the FBI unlock Farook’s iPhone with its UFED Touch device, and the company recently landed a $218,000 contract with the agency.
Susteen, which posts annual sales of less than $10 million, also competes against Oxygen Software in Russia and Sweden-based Micro Systemation AB.
It employs about 50 companywide in Irvine, Brazil and Japan, and its products are manufactured and assembled in Torrance.
The company’s software can access data from iOS 7 iPhones and earlier, as well as phones running Android 6 Marshmellow and earlier. It’s seeking engineers to tackle more recent operating systems.
Early Evolution
Hiro Maruyama founded Susteen in 1992 in El Paso, Texas, and moved it to Southern California a short while later. Maruyama, who specializes in designing input-output functions and firmware, has had long ties with customers such as Intel, HP and Dell.
He shifted his business strategy mid-1990s from manufacturing computers and related products to cell phones and developed what would become the prominent device for transferring contacts and other data from one phone to another.
DataPilot has sold more than 16 million units in Japan and the U.S., where it’s still carried in Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics and online retailers for about $30. The store version, which is carried by the likes of Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, sometimes goes by the name Mobile Genie.
The product was a hit in law enforcement circles, and by 2005 the FBI was buying more than 100 units per month to aid investigations.
The agency contacted Maruyama, ran a background check on him, and asked the computer science engineer to go to South Carolina for a meeting. They told him the agency couldn’t grab data from a Nokia phone connected to a crime.
Maruyama told them he could do the job, as one of the first seeds of the modern-day mobile forensics industry was planted.
“I taught them how to get some data, and it grew into a software development fee,” he said. “So I got the contract to design software for the FBI.”
The Big New Thing
Susteen leveraged its work behind the DataPilot to create features for cell phone management and investigative tools and analysis in developing Secure View, the first mobile-forensic software on the market. The product is used by more than 700 law enforcement agencies today.
Susteen, which moved from Torrance to OC in 2001, is developing a few more consumer products that make it easier for users to pull data and securely transfer it to other devices.
“For us, it’s not so much about data encryption, it’s about allowing the consumer to control their own data, know where that is, and make sure it is kept safe,” Kirby said.
Meanwhile, the Burner Breaker, which notifies law enforcement through text or email alerts when it acquires data from a phone, is expected to provide a sales bump when it’s officially launched in a few months.
Law enforcement agencies can send Susteen the phone after submitting a chain of custody and paying a licensing fee per user. The company also can build the device in a crime lab for about $20,000 to $30,000, which includes a year of service.
Susteen estimates its revenue will jump 25% from Burner Breaker sales and services, Kirby said.
“This is the big new thing.”
