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.

With nearly half a billion users, Telegram is an incredibly popular cross-platform instant messaging app. While Telegram is not considered the most secure instant messaging app (this title belongs to Signal), its conversation histories do not appear in either iTunes or iCloud backups. Moreover, Telegram secure chats are not stored on Telegram servers. As a result, Telegram secret chats can be only extracted from the device of origin. Learn how to extract and analyse Telegram secret chats from the iPhone file system image.

Instant messaging apps have become the de-facto standard of real-time, text-based communications. The acquisition of instant messaging chats and communication histories can be extremely important for an investigation. In this article, we compare the five top instant messaging apps for iOS in the context of their forensic analysis.

Last week, Microsoft Edge has become the second most popular desktop Web browser based on NetMarketShare usage figures. The new, Chromium-powered Edge offers impressive levels of customization and performance, much better compatibility with Web sites. The new browser is available on multiple platforms including older versions of Windows. With Chromium-based Edge quickly gaining momentum, we felt the urge of researching its protected storage.

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 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.

We recently introduced a new acquisition method for iPhone and iPad devices. The fast, simple and safe extraction agent requires no jailbreak, and delivers the full file system image and the keychain. The latest release of Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit expanded this method to iOS 13 and filled the gaps in some versions of iOS 12 that were missing support (such as iOS 12.3 and 12.4.1). Finally, we now officially support the latest generation of iPhone devices including the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. The new compatibility matrix becomes significantly more diverse with this release, so bear with us to learn which iOS devices can be extracted without a jailbreak.

Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit can perform full file system acquisition and decrypt the keychain from non-jailbroken iPhone and iPad devices. The caveat: the device must be running iOS 11 or 12 (except iOS 12.3, 12.3.1 and 12.4.1), and you must use an Apple ID registered in Apple’s Developer Program. In this article, I’ll explain the pros and contras of the new extraction method compared to traditional acquisition based on the jailbreak.