It took nearly 4 months for the FBI to break into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers, but a more affordable and faster solution was right there where they’d expect the least: right on the street, in retail shops.

A British retailer called Fone Fun Shop sells a device that can unlock an iPhone running iOS 7 in just a few hours, as it manages to bypass the device’s auto-locking system when inputting wrong codes and then brute-forces the protection system by trying all possible passcode combinations.

The Daily Mail has found such a device in a store in Sheffield and purchased one for just 120 pounds ($170/€150), trying to determine its efficiency on an iPhone 5C protected with a random four-digit code. And it turns out that the so-called IP Box is indeed effective, as it checks every single combination in approximately 6 seconds, with a total time of the whole process reaching only 16 and a half hours.

This means that it takes less than a day to break into an iPhone running iOS 7 and protected with a passcode, although the chances are that you can unlock it much faster if the code it tries is among the first.

Since it’s specifically aimed at iOS 7 devices, many users would rest assured thinking that they have already updated to iOS 9. The seller of the IP Box, however, claims that a version compatible with iOS 9 is already in the works and it should be put up for sale anytime soon. How about that?

Created with a good purpose

Company director of Fone Fun Shop, Mark Strachan, told the newspaper that the device was developed to help families recover their photos from a locked device.

“We have also helped many people get access to all their phone book contacts, especially people in business, who put everything in their iPhones such as suppliers and customer contact details that would be totally lost unless they cracked the passcode to their phone,” he said.

“We discovered the device via our Hong Kong office and were skeptical as to whether it would work but after testing we discovered it worked perfectly.”

The FBI needed to work together with a third-party to develop something similar and the feds most likely paid a large amount of money to break into the San Bernardino iPhone. But the Fone Fun Shop director says this is most likely the same technology as the one used by the FBI to crack the passcode of the San Bernardino iPhone.

Such news can only be worrying for those with an iPhone who thought they are fully protected with a fingerprint and passcode protection, so it remains to be seen how fast Apple can patch this and make its phones secure again. Because without a doubt, that’s what Apple should be doing already.