iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, currently in beta, add a bootable recovery menu to the iPhone and iPad. Hold the power button while the device starts up and you land in a small pre-boot environment with six options, one of which is the old “connect to computer” recovery mode. This is the same idea Apple silicon Macs have had for years, and it is overdue on the phone.

Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit begins low-level extraction by sideloading the extraction agent, and the agent will not run until the phone has completed one or two checks against Apple’s servers. Network requests, on a phone that is evidence. That single requirement is why we have shipped three different firewalls over the past three years. The newest one, EIFT Firewall, is a free macOS application and a direct replacement for the 2023 script.