Silicon Prairie Cyber Services' Blog

The GrapheneOS. Duress passwords. It's all over the news.  This is the case of Samuel Tunick, who was detained by CBP when he returned to the United States via the Atlanta airport. The Government alleges he provided a password to agents that would wipe his phone. It's been reported that his phone had GrapheneOS installed on it.  According to the article from The Guardian ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone ), " Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion." Here's the direct quote from the motion regarding the phone password " Mr. Tunick provided a password to his cell phone and e-reader. According to the government, when the CBP officers entered the password on Case 1:25-cr-0049...

A couple of months ago, I flew out to a client site to conduct some iPhone extractions on-site. Unfortunately, I ran into some problems, and I'm here to share what I learned so you can fix your problems faster. I did all the things to prepare, including lots of communication with the client. I made sure the iPhones were supported. I updated my Verakey before I left the office. I updated the Verakey the night before while in the hotel.  I arrive on site, and of course, there is another update for the Verakey. The update is downloading, downloading, downloading, and that's when it happens... AN ERROR, and now I have a weird purple light on the Verakey. It's still connected to the Internet, so I do what any good forensic examiner would do. I reboot the Verakey. I get logged back in and here is the dreaded error messages that I am still seeing... THE APPLOGIC PACKAGE IS MISSING.  If you've ever watched your Verakey update, you know this is the component that is constantly g...

  AI has its place. But it's not conducting my digital forensic exam for me. It's not writing the report for me either. It's not doing homework for students either. You have to have a fundamental knowledge of a subject to leverage AI in any meaningful and accurate way. We're starting to see some big pitfalls in those organizations that dumped people and went all in on AI to do work. Hopefully, that's your big hint to double down on learning and increasing your own knowledge instead of being a copy-paste pro. Otherwise, if we don't use our brains, we survived Judgement Day in 1997 / 2004 only to submit to the machines a few decades later.

The cost of mobile forensics is increasing, and it's not just the price of the software to blame. As mobile phones continue to become more complicated and capable of doing more super cool things, the ability to retrieve and analyze data takes longer because it's all become more complicated. Gone are the days of the quick, 16-hour examination of an iPhone. If your client only cares about the content of texts, emails, and pictures, then, sure, you could grab that for them in 16 hours. But if you need anything more in-depth (and you will), it will take a lot more analysis and time than that. Things change in every update, which means the examiner must spend more time analyzing, testing, and validating the data. Even IF something has NOT changed with an update, many mobile device exams require some testing and validating of the data. All of this increases the prices passed to the clients in three ways. First, the cost of the software is passed along. Second, the longer it takes t...