The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Law Enforcement Department Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) has signed a $3 million worth of contract with Magnet Forensics, a company that creates phone hacks and unlock devices called Graykey.
The contract, which appeared on Tuesday in the federal procurement database, said it was for software licensing of HSI's phone hacking technology to “recover digital evidence, process multiple devices, and generate forensic reports essential to protecting national security and public disclosure.”
The contract doesn't mention the product's name, but it could be referring to Graykey, a forensic system for unlocking smartphones and extracting data from them. Magnet Forensic merged with Grayshift in 2023 following an acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
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Apart from this latest contract, the procurement database shows ICE and HSI has signed several other contracts with Magnet Forensics and its partner Panamerica computers.
Magnet Griffeye Enterprise subscription. A platform for collecting, processing, organizing and analyzing data and evidence. The HSI contract was worth $145,000 and was signed Tuesday. It signed on September 5th with a Graykey Premier software update license for “iOS and Android Extraction of Electronics for Law Enforcement Investigations,” specifically for HSIs in Detroit, with a $90,000 worth of contract. Helps HSI purchase software licenses to “recover digital evidence across multiple devices for investigation operations.” Charlotte's HSI signed on August 18th.
Magnet Forensics did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.
An ICE spokesman confirmed TechCrunch's outreach but did not comment until the time of the report. DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE has large-scale technical tools, including a large number of technical tools, including facial recognition software provided by ClearView AI, mobile phone spyware created by Paragon, and data analysis software created by Palantir.
Last year, ICE signed a contract with Graykey's Magnet Forensics worth $5 million, as first reported by Forbes at the time. Graykey was launched in 2016 and competed against the more established phone hacking system UFED, created by Israeli company Cellebrite.