The little-known Japanese company at the center of a legal tussle between Apple and the U.S. government over the hacking of an iPhone built its business on pinball game machines and stumbled into the mobile phone security business almost by accident.
Sun Corp. is the parent company of Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization, which worked with the FBI to crack an iPhone connected in a terrorist attack, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified as the matter is private.
Neither Cellebrite nor the FBI have confirmed the link, and a Sun Corp. spokesman on Thursday said the company isn’t able to comment on specific criminal cases.
Sun — based in Konan, Aichi, a city of 100,000 and more than 200 miles southwest of Tokyo — has been building pinball-like game machines found in Japan’s pachinko parlors since the 1970s but has often displayed bigger tech ambitions.
Sun developed personal computers in the late 1970s, computer games and, more recently, iPhone mah-jongg apps. In 2007, as sales slumped, Sun acquired Cellebrite, based in Petah Tikva, Israel.
The purchase of Cellebrite, which hadn’t yet ventured into forensics, was mainly to add phone-to-phone data transfer to Sun’s fledgling telecommunications business, Sun spokesman Hidefumi Sugaya said in a telephone interview. When Cellebrite later took on investigative agencies such as the FBI as clients, the business took off, and today most of Sun’s mobile data solutions business comes from Cellebrite.
Sun’s shares have surged since March 21, when U.S. authorities said a third party demonstrated a way to access data on the iPhone used in the San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting last year.
“If it’s Cellebrite, it’s probably good publicity for them,” said Bryce Boland, chief technology officer at security company FireEye Inc.
Revenue from Cellebrite’s mobile data solutions division overtook pachinko parts in Sun’s fiscal year ending March 2014 and contributed $121 million or 50 percent of sales in the last fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It’s now Sun’s largest business segment.
Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth last week identified Cellebrite, which has captured a large slice of the mobile forensics market over the past decade, as the FBI’s partner in cracking the iPhone.
The U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday it has gained access to the data on the shooter’s phone with the help of a third party and dropped its legal case against Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple.
