Cellebrite: Low Profile Outfit Shares Some High Value Information
March 27, 2020
Cellebrite, now owned by Japanese interests, is not a household word. That’s good from DarkCyber’s point of view. If you want to know more about this company, navigate to the company’s Web site.
“Cellebrite Unveils the Top Global Digital Intelligence Trends for 2020” provides observations / finds in its Annual Digital Intelligence Industry Benchmark Report for 2020. Our video program will consider some of these findings in the context of cyber intelligence. However, there are four items of interest which DarkCyber wants to highlight in this short article.
Intelligence and other enforcement agencies are slow to adapt. This finding is in line with DarkCyber’s experience. We reported on March 24, 2020, in our DarkCyber video that the Canadian medical intelligence firm Bluedot identified the threat of the corona virus in November 2019. How quickly did the governments of major countries react? How is the US reacting now? The “slowness” is bureaucratic friction. Who wants to be identified as the person who was wrong? In terms of cyber crime, Cellebrite’s data suggest “43 percent of agencies report either a poor or mediocre strategy or no digital intelligence strategy at all.” [emphasis added].
Government agency managers want modernization to help attract new officers. The Cellebrite study reports, “Most agency managers believe police forces that embrace mobile tech to collect digital evidence in the field will help reduce turnover and be significantly more prepared to meet the digital evidence challenges of 2020.” DarkCyber wants to point out that skilled cyber professionals do not grow on trees. Incentives, salaries, and work magnetism are more important than “hopes.”
Budgets are an issue. This is a “duh” finding. DarkCyber is not being critical of Cellebrite. Anyone involved directly or indirectly in enforcement or intelligence knows that bad actors seem to have infinite scalability. Government entities do not. The report says, “With the deluge of digital devices and cloud data sources, examiners face an average 3-month backlog and an average backlog of 89 devices per station. The push for backdoors is not designed to compromise user privacy; it is a pragmatic response to the urgent need to obtain information as close to real time as possible. Cellebrite’s tools have responded to the need for speed, but for many governments’ enforcement and intelligence agencies, a 90 day period of standing around means that bad actors have an advantage.
DarkCyber will consider more findings from this report in an upcoming video news program. Watch this blog for the release date for the program.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
