The new year is fast approaching, and of course we are curious to know what it has in store for us in the field of computer, mobile, and cloud forensics. But before 2022 is over, we invite you to take a moment to reflect on what 2022 has been like for us. More research, development and updates remained our top priority, as it has been in all previous years. We have continued with constant improvement to our solutions by launching new features and expanding product capabilities. We’ve also got a chance to attend some conferences to meet with you in person and share our expertise. So, here’s our take on the results of 2022.

The new year is just around the corner, and so it’s the right time to review our achievements in 2021. We’ve done plenty of researching, developing and updating, and posted a great deal of content in our blog. Let’s run through the most exciting developments of the year!

There was a 3-fold increase in identity theft and more than 2-fold increase in phishing attacks registered in 2020 compared to 2019 according to IC3 report. A whopping 50 – 81% of attacks (depending on who you read) are targeting both corporate and private sectors to steal users’ login credentials; that is, passwords. No matter what changes happen in data security, passwords remain the most wide-spread means of protection.

In today’s world of everyone wanting a slice of one’s personal information, users become more and more concerned about the privacy. The WhatsApp/Facebook integration raised an additional concern, considering that Facebook-owned Messenger requests the largest number of invasive permissions among all commonly used messengers. Data privacy and security concerns are mounting like a snowball. 2020 brought multiple data breach incidents from popular blogging resources from LiveJournal whose users’ data was breached and leaked to the darknet to financial institutions like Postbank with 12M exposed credit cards, hospitality giants as Mariott with 383 million records compromised or even Microsoft customers who also suffered from privacy-related issues.

19 years ago, on July 16, 2001, the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, almost immediately after his speech at the DEF CON hacker conference, on a number of charges by Adobe. Dmitry was accused of many things, from software trafficking to conspiring with Elcomsoft and “third parties”, who put up the software for sale that could bypass technological protection on copyrighted material. Dmitry’s career at Elcomsoft began with a project on gaining access to protected Access databases. Soon, Dmitry got an idea about the security of PDF documents, and so he started working on it. From this idea the never-to-be-forgotten Advanced eBook Processor was born, because of which Dmitry was arrested in 2001 at DEF CON in Las Vegas, NV.

For us, this year has been extremely replete with all sorts of developments in desktop, mobile and cloud forensics. We are proud with our achievements and want to share with you. Let’s have a quick look at what we’ve achieved in the year 2019.

Starting with version 7.0, Elcomsoft Phone Breaker has the ability to access, decrypt and display passwords stored in the user’s iCloud Keychain. The requirements and steps differ across Apple accounts, and depend on factors such as whether or not the user has Two-Factor Authentication, and if not, whether or not the user configured an iCloud Security Code. Let’s review the steps one needs to take in order to successfully acquire iCloud Keychain.

Dear friends, here we come with a set of novelties from our ElcomShop. We’ve made a few new designs and added new fancy products, such as long sleeve shirts for girls and baseball caps for boys and separately for dads 🙂 and mugs for everyone. All company designs applied to a wide and varied range of products can be found in our shop window.

It is our greatest pleasure to recommend the newest edition of “Hacking For Dummies” by Kevin Beaver, an independent IT security consultant, a practical guide on computer and mobile security updated to the current state of industry. With a natural talent of word Kevin easily guides you through security issues in a very clear and consistent manner, so that all major aspects of IT security, authentication and pen-testing are covered. With such a harmonious and sequential unveiling of security subjects as in this book, it is much easier to dig deeper into particular questions of your own interest.

Although we’ve already embraced the EFS-encryption/decryption in some of our white papers and case studies, now we’d like to share a video tutorial because seeing once is better than hearing reading twice. So, in this video you will see how to decrypt EFS-encrypted data with help of Advanced EFS Data Recovery and how to recover Windows user account password with Proactive System Password Recovery (because it’s still obligatory for this type of encryption).