As you may know, we have recently updated Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, bumping the version number from 1.30 to 1.31. A very minor update? A bunch of unnamed bug fixes and performance improvements? Not really. Under the hood, the new release has major changes that will greatly affect usage experience. What exactly has changed and why, and what are the forensic implications of these changes? Bear with us to find out.

Apple, it’s not funny anymore.

We’ve got a few forensic tools for getting data off the cloud, with Apple iCloud and Google Account being the biggest two. Every once in a while, the cloud owners (Google and Apple) make changes to their protocols or authentication mechanisms, or employ additional security measures to prevent third-party access to user accounts. Every time this happens, we try to push a hotfix as soon as possible, sometimes in just a day or two. In this article, we’ll try to address our customers’ major concerns, give detailed explanations on what’s going on with cloud access, and provide our predictions on what could happen in the future.

Even before we released Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, you’ve been able to download users’ location data from Google. What you would get then was a JSON file containing timestamped geolocation coordinates. While this is an industry-standard open data format, it provides little insight on which places the user actually visits. A full JSON journal filled with location data hardly provides anything more than timestamped geographic coordinates. Even if you pin those coordinates to a map, you’ll still have to scrutinize the history to find out which place the user has actually gone to.

In the world of no jailbreak, acquisition opportunities are limited. Experts are struggling to access more information from those sources that are still available. Every little bit counts. In Elcomsoft Phone Viewer 3.0, we’ve added what might appear like a small bit: the ability to view undismissed iOS notifications. Unexciting? Hardly. Read along to discover how extracting notifications from iOS backups can make all the difference in an investigation! (more…)

According to surveys, the average English-speaking consumer maintains around 27 online accounts. Memorizing 27 unique, cryptographically secure passwords is nearly impossible for a person one could reasonably call “average”. As a result, the average person tends to reuse passwords, which means that a single password (or its simple variations) can be used to protect multiple online accounts and services. The same passwords are very likely to be chosen to protect access to offline resources such as encrypted archives and documents. In fact, several independent researches published between 2012 and 2016 suggest that between 59 and 61 per cent of consumers reuse passwords.

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?

As you may already know, we’ve added Android support to our WhatsApp acquisition tool, Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp. While the updated tool can now extract WhatsApp communication histories directly from Android smartphones with or without root access, how do you actually use it, and how does it work? In this blog post we’ll be looking into the technical detail and learn how to use the tool.

Each iteration of iOS is getting more secure. With no jailbreak available for the current version of iOS, what acquisition methods are available for the iPhone 7, 7 Plus and other devices updating to iOS 10? How does the recent update of Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit help extracting a locked iOS 10 iPhone? Read along to find out!