We released a major update to Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor, a tool for corporate customers to probe wireless network security. Major addition in this release is the new Wi-Fi sniffer, which now supports the majority of general-use Wi-Fi adapters (as opposed to only allowing the use of a dedicated AirPCap adapter). The built-in Wi-Fi sniffer is a component allowing the tool to automatically intercept wireless traffic, save Wi-Fi handshake packet and perform an accelerated attack on the original WPA/WPA2-PSK password.

The previous article was about the theory. In this part we’ll go directly to practice. If you possess a turned on and locked iOS device and have no means of unlocking it with either Touch ID or passcode, you may still be able to obtain a backup via the process called logical acquisition. While logical acquisition may return somewhat less information compared to the more advanced physical acquisition, it must be noted that physical acquisition may not be available at all on a given device.

In recent versions of iOS, successful acquisition of a locked device is no longer a given. Multiple protection layers and Apple’s new policy on handling government requests make forensic experts look elsewhere when investigating Apple smartphones.

iCloud sync is everywhere. Your contacts and calendars, system backups and photos can be stored in the cloud on Apple servers. This time, we discovered that yet another piece of data is stored in the cloud for no apparent reason. Using an iPhone and have an active iCloud account? Your calls will sync with iCloud whether you want it or not. In fact, most users we’ve heard from don’t want this “feature”, yet Apple has no official way to turn off this behavior other than telling people “not using the same Apple ID on different devices”. What’s up with that? Let’s try to find out.

Today we are super excited: our first book on mobile forensics just got published! The book is called “Mobile Forensics – Advanced Investigative Strategies”, and is about everything you need to successfully acquire evidence from the widest range of mobile devices. Unlike most other books on this subject, we don’t just throw file names or hex dumps at your face. Instead, we discuss the issues of seizing mobile devices and preserving digital evidence before it reaches the lab; talk about acquisition options available in every case, and help you choose the correct acquisition path to extract evidence with least time and minimal risk.

Google is pushing Android to make it a truly secure mobile OS. Mandatory encryption and secure boot make physical acquisition of new Android devices a dead end.

We discovered a major security flaw in the iOS 10 backup protection mechanism. This security flaw allowed us developing a new attack that is able to bypass certain security checks when enumerating passwords protecting local (iTunes) backups made by iOS 10 devices.

FileVault 2 is a whole-disk encryption scheme used in Apple’s Mac OS X using secure XTS-AES encryption to protect the startup partition. Brute-forcing your way into a crypto container protected with a 256-bit key is a dead end.

Releasing a major update of a complex forensic tool is always tough. New data locations and formats, new protocols and APIs require an extensive amount of research. Sometimes, we discover things that surprise us. Researching Apple’s iCloud Photo Library (to be integrated into Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.0) led to a particularly big surprise. We discovered that Apple keeps holding on to the photos you stored in iCloud Photo Library and then deleted, keeping “deleted” images for much longer than the advertised 30 days without telling anyone. Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.0 becomes the first tool on the market to gain access to deleted images going back past 30 days.

For many months, a working jailbreak was not available for current versions of iOS. In the end of July, Pangu released public jailbreak for iOS 9.2-9.3.3. A few days ago, Apple patched the exploit and started seeding iOS 9.3.4. This was the shortest-living jailbreak in history.