In the aftermath of the San Bernadino shootings last year the FBI was unable to hack past the security of an iPhone and demanded that Apple break their own security. A security firm stepped forward and used a hardware attack to circumvent entry. How did they do it? Here is a high level description of what security researchers did -- likely similar to what the security firm did: http://www.bbc.com/
The problem is that after too many failed attempts to enter a passcode the phone will permanently shut down. The challenge is to remove the attempt limit so all possible passcodes can be tried -- the passcode on that phone was only 4 numbers (new phones require 6 which is considerably more guesses). The trick was to find the memory chip that stored the count and replace it with a new chip with a zeroed count before the limit was reached (much harder to do than it sounds). It is a laborious process, but it can be done.
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