iOS forensics is always a lot of fun. Say, you’ve got an iPhone of a recent generation. It’s locked, you are blank about the passcode, and the worst part is it’s more than just the four proverbial digits (the last iOS defaults to six). And you don’t have their computer, and there is not an iCloud account either. A horror story where no one, even us, can do anything about it.

iOS 11 is finally here. We already covered some of the issues related to iOS 11 forensics, but that was only part of the story.

In the US, Factory Reset Protection (FRP) is a mandatory part of each mobile ecosystem. The use of factory reset protection in mobile devices helped tame smartphone theft by discouraging criminals and dramatically reducing resale value of stolen devices. Compared to other mobile ecosystems, Apple’s implementation of factory reset protection has always been considered exemplary. A combination of a locked bootloader, secure boot chain and obligatory online activation of every iPhone makes iCloud lock one exemplary implementation of factory reset protection.

In today’s world, everything is stored in the cloud. Your backups can be stored in the cloud. The “big brother” knows where you had lunch yesterday and how long you’ve been there. Your photos can back up to the cloud, as well as your calls and messages. Finally, your passwords are also stored online – at least if you don’t disable iCloud Keychain. Let’s follow the history of Apple iCloud, its most known hacks and our own forensic efforts.

We received some great feedback on the original article about attacking master passwords of several popular password managers. In one discussion, our benchmark numbers for 1Password were questioned. We had no choice but to re-run the benchmarks and publish an updated chart along with some technical details and explanations. We bring our apologies to AgileBits, the developers of 1Password, for letting the wrong number creep in to our benchmark. Can we still break into 1Password by attacking the master password? Please bear with us for up-to-date information and detailed technical discussion.

WhatsApp is one of the most secure messengers with full end-to-end encryption. Messages exchanged between WhatsApp users are using an encrypted point-to-point communication protocol rendering man-in-the-middle attacks useless. WhatsApp communications are never stored or backed up on WhatsApp servers. All this makes government snooping on WhatsApp users increasingly difficult.

…dead? Not really, not completely, and not for every device. We’ve just updated iOS Forensic Toolkit to add physical support for some previously unsupported combinations of hardware (32-bit devices) and software (iOS 9.1 through 9.3.4). The intent was helping our law enforcement and forensic customers clear some of the backlog, finally taking care of evidence kept on dusty shelves in the back room. In order to do the extraction, you’ll need to install the “Home Depot” jailbreak from http://wall.supplies and, obviously, Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit 2.30.

We’ve just updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to version 6.60, adding remote acquisition support for Microsoft Windows 10 phones and desktops. The new build can pull search and Web browsing history, call logs, and location history directly from the user’s Microsoft Account. In this article we’ll have a look at what exactly is available and can be extracted and where this information is stored. We will also list the steps required to extract and view the data.

Apple, it’s not funny anymore.

Your browsing history represents your habits. You are what you read, and your browsing history reflects that. Your Google searches, visits to news sites, activities in blogs and forums, shopping, banking, communications in social networks and other Web-based activities can picture your daily activities. It could be that the browsing history is the most intimate part of what they call “online privacy”. You wouldn’t want your browsing history become public, would you?