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Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, how convenient. If it truly did fall off the truck right while he is on a walk then there is the possibility that is a rubber duckie attack. This is basically the equivalent of leaving a USB flash drive lying around. I hope the author took the necessary precautions when reverse engineering the device. Companies like cellebrite have deep connections to certain three letter communities that staging this sort of attacks trivial.

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"falling off a truck" is slang for "was stolen".

Given the sort of business Cellebrite is in, they would probably still want to treat anything connected to it with an overabundance of caution.

TIL: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/fall+off+a+truck

Edit: looking up a bit more, it seems like this idiom is used to denote goods sold for cheap because they were stolen. Like "Bob is selling genuine iPhones very cheap, I fear they fell from the back of a truck".

Edit edit: I initially took it as "we won't tell how we got this", because I didn't know this idiom, but it seems several people agree with this interpretation. Not necessarily stolen, but obtained from an undisclosed source.

That isn't quite right. Although it's commonly used to describe something that's been stolen, it's more generally used to indicate that the speaker doesn't want to talk about where it came from. That's how it's been used in this article.

I think we can be relatively confident that the connected machine was airgapped and perhaps run in a VM.

Perhaps even in a faraday cage..

> (...) and perhaps run in a VM.

One of the screenshots[0] shows the VMware Tools Service running, so yeah, looks like a virtualized guest.

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/images/cellebrite-dlls-loaded.png

> If it truly did fall of the truck

lol

Seeing reactions like GP’s I’m surprised at how many people don’t know this expression.

I thought it was an euphemism because they couldn't reveal who gave it to them. Confessing it was stolen, even as an euphemism, is too blatant to be taken seriously IMO.

If English is your second language, you may not have come across it. It's a very informal and infrequent idiom.

FWIW we have the exact same expression in French “c’est tombé du camion”

Dito for German: "vom Laster gefallen"

Even if you didn't, i think its pretty obvious from context.

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