How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones

Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by neuralRiot on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @03:44PM (#19862189)

To make it "new" or virgin they need to replace the CPU an the baseband, I'm not sure how they manage the secure enclave problem as the touch id is tied to the CPU.

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by badinker on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @05:51PM (#19863334)

Yeah this is wrong. You would need to replace the CPU, both eeproms, and baseband CPU, along with reprogramming the nand with the matching serial and mac address from the clean components. Its not feasible. Now for an ipad, thats another story. I've done hundreds of unlocks for them, since they either don't have an IMEI or can easily be converted to Wifi only, then you only need to remove the nand and reprogram with clean activation data that can easily and cheaply be found online from old retired ipads that are no longer in use. Sometimes you have to replace the wifi modules, as the drivers are different between wifi only and cellular versions.

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by dashesyan on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @06:00PM (#19863414)

The article linked to a 34 minute YouTube video which demonstrated one unlock method: they replaced a locked iPhone's CPU, baseband CPU, baseband EPROM, NAND Flash (reprogrammed), and touch ID sensor with ones from a donor iPhone and were able to restore iOS.

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by rasz on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @11:11PM (#19865044)

except its cheaper to just fix donor iphone that already has all the listed components working

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by londons_explore on Thursday May 09, 2019 @02:06AM (#19865794)

Labour is cheap in Vietnam...

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by knd775 on Thursday May 09, 2019 @10:33AM (#19868623)

But the parts aren't. It simply does not make sense to go that route.

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by londons_explore on Friday May 10, 2019 @03:03AM (#19875692)

The parts are if you buy water damaged devices.

Water tends to kill the PCB (due to corrosion), but all the individual chips will usually survive.

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by acd on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @04:20PM (#19862499)

If you have a developer iphone there is no secure enclave?

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyakgw/the-prototype-dev-...

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Re:How Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones by olliej on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @04:50PM (#19862774)

Dev iPhones have an SE, the fundamental silicon is the same.

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