San Bernardino County DA: Dec. 2 terrorist may have been plaing cyber attack

San Beardino County District Attoey Michael Ramos, in a legal brief submitted Thursday to U.S. Magistrate Sheri Pym, said Syed Rizwan Farook may have planted a virus on his work-issued iPhone that could launch a cyber attack capable of infecting and crashing the county’s computer network.

Ramos’ brief was one of several filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Riverside by various law enforcement organizations in support of Pym’s Feb. 16 order compelling Apple Inc. to build specialize software that would allow the FBI to bypass the phone’s encrypted passcode and access its data.

“The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have coected to the San Beardino County computer network,” Ramos wrote in his friend of the court brief. “The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Beardino County’s infrastructure.”

Armed with assault rifles and clad in tactical gear, Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, walked into the Inland Regional Center in San Beardino shortly before 11 a.m. Dec. 2 and opened fire on a crowd of about 70 people, killing 14 people and wounding 22 others. The Redlands couple were killed in a shootout police hours after the attack.

Most of those killed or wounded in the mass shooting, including Farook, were employees of the county’s environmental health services division, who were attending a training seminar that moing.

FBI agents found two smashed mobile phones in a dumpster behind Farook’s Redlands townhouse, and his work-issued iPhone 5C was found, intact but passcode encrypted, in a black Lexus parked in front of the residence. Investigators believe that phone contains communications between Farook and some of the victims.

Ramos is the first to broach the subject of a possible cyber attack Farook may have been plaing on the county computer network using his work-issued phone.

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