Posts Tagged ‘Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery’

There is a bit of confusion about our software designed to allow breaking into password-protected systems, files, documents, and encrypted containers. We have as many as three products (and five different tools) dealing with the matter: Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor (with an unnamed memory dumping tool), Elcomsoft System Recovery and Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, which also includes Elcomsoft Hash Extractor as part of the package. Let’s briefly go through all of them. Hopefully it will help you select the right product for your needs and save time in your investigation.

BitLocker is one of the most advanced and most commonly used volume encryption solutions. BitLocker is well-studied and extensively documented solution with few known vulnerabilities and a limited number of possible vectors of attack. BitLocker volumes may be protected with one or more protectors such as the hardware-bound TPM, user-selectable password, USB key, or combination thereof. Attacking the password is only possible in one of these cases, while other protectors require a very different set of attacks. Learn how to approach BitLocker volumes depending on the type of protector.

When attacking a password, the traditional forensic workflow requires uploading the entire encrypted file or document into a password recovery tool. This approach, while simple and intuitive, has one major drawback if you are using remote computers or cloud instances to perform an attack. If the remote computer is compromised, the entire file or document is leaked complete with its (still encrypted) contents. Learn how to overcome this issue and perform remote attacks without the reason of leaking personal information.

Accessing a locked system is always a challenge. While you might be tempted to pull the plug and image the disk, you could miss a lot of valuable evidence if you do. Full-disk encryption, EFS-encrypted files and folders and everything protected with DPAPI (including the passwords stored in most modern Web browsers) are just a few obstacles to mention. Recovering the original Windows logon is a must to access the full set of data, while resetting the logon password may help unlock working accounts in emergencies.

Password managers such as LastPass are designed from the ground up to withstand brute-force attacks on the password database. Using encryption and thousands of hash iterations, the protection is made to slow down access to the encrypted vault that contains all of the user’s stored passwords. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how to unlock LastPass password vault instantly without running a length attack.

Modern encryption tools employ strong encryption with multiple hash iterations, making passwords extremely difficult to break. The November article “What is password recovery and how it is different from password cracking” explains the differences between instantly accessing protected information and attempting to break the original plain-text password. In that article, I briefly mentioned GPU acceleration and distributed attacks as methods to speed up the recovery. In this article, I’ll discuss the two acceleration techniques in more detail.

Modern applications use highly secure and thus deliberately slow algorithms for verifying passwords. For this reason, the password recovery process may take a lot of time and require extreme computational resources. You can build your own powerful cluster to accelerate brute-force attacks, but if you only need to recover a password every once in a while, maintaining your own cluster may not be the best investment. Cloud services can help do a one-off job faster. For a long time, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery had supported Amazon cloud services with automatic deployment on Amazon’s powerful GPU-accelerated servers. The latest update brings support for Microsoft Azure, adding the ability to automatically deploy Password Recovery Agents to virtual machines created in Microsoft Azure. In this article I will describe the deployment steps.

Tally ERP 9 is a “new-age business management software for new-age businesses” that is “tailor-made to delight”. With more than two million users, Tally is one of the most popular tools of its kind in India. The product includes the company’s implementation of secure storage named Tally Vault. How secure is Tally Vault, and what does one need to break in? In this article, we’ve provided some insights on how ElcomSoft researchers work when adding support for a new file format.

VeraCrypt is a de-facto successor to TrueCrypt, one of the most popular cryptographic tools for full-disk encryption of internal and external storage devices. Compared to TrueCrypt, which it effectively replaced, VeraCrypt employs a newer and more secure format for encrypted containers, and significantly expands the number of supported encryption algorithms and hash functions. Learn how to break VeraCrypt containers with distributed password attacks.

If you are familiar with breaking passwords, you already know that different tools and file formats require a very different amount of efforts to break. Breaking a password protecting a RAR archive can take ten times as long as breaking a password to a ZIP archive with the same content, while breaking a Word document saved in Office 2016 can take ten times as long as breaking an Office 2010 document. With solutions for over 300 file formats and encryption algorithms, we still find iTunes backups amazing, and their passwords to be very different from the rest of the crop in some interesting ways. In this article we tried to gather everything we know about iTunes backup passwords to help you break (or reset) their passwords in the most efficient way.