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Thursday, October 29, 2026Oct 29

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How the FBI might hack into an iPhone without Apple’s help

FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 25, 2015, file photo, a customer tries out a new Apple iPhone 6S at an Apple store in Chicago. The FBI now says that it may have a way to crack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, despite previous claims that it could only achieve that with Apple’s help, but it remains unclear exactly how it plans to do that. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)
FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 25, 2015, file photo, a customer tries out a new Apple iPhone 6S at an Apple store in Chicago. The FBI now says that it may have a way to crack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, despite previous claims that it could only achieve that with Apple’s help, but it remains unclear exactly how it plans to do that. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File) FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 25, 2015, file photo, a customer tries out a new Apple iPhone 6S at an Apple store in Chicago. The FBI now says that it may have a way to crack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, despite previous claims that it could only achieve that with Apple’s help, but it remains unclear exactly how it plans to do that. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)

NEW YORK (AP) – For more than a month, federal investigators have insisted they have no alternative but to force Apple to help them open up a phone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

That changed Monday when the Justice Department said an “outside party” recently showed the FBI a different way to access the data on the phone used by Syed Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in the Dec. 2 attack.

The magistrate judge in the case postponed a hearing scheduled for Tuesday and gave the government two weeks to test its method. But federal officials have been mum about who came forward and what method they’ve proposed. Here are some of the leading options outside experts think the FBI might be exploring.

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