General Discussion

This was really early in the iPhone era and the hack kits weren’t widely available. I don’t know if you remember the struggles of the LEOs to access locked iPhones. Today, what you suggest is definitely horses and not zebras. If it was a hack, it would have been custom.

However, the tech did suspect it might be a firmware hack somewhere in the main board which was inserted when the board was built. (I vaguely recall that there were issues with that at the time. Especially, on jump drives.) Her investigation of this possibility was negligible due to the fact that a replacement phone was cheaper than going to that level of repair. The test for that might’ve required two phones and they were still scarce.