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!

Cloud acquisition has been available for several years. iPhones and iPads running recent versions of iOS can store snapshots of their data in the cloud. Cloud backups are created automatically on a daily basis provided that the device is charging while connected to a known Wi-Fi network. While iCloud backups are great for investigations, there is one thing that might be missing, and that’s up-to-date information about user activities that occurred after the moment the backup was created. In this article, we’ll discuss an alternative cloud acquisition option available for iOS devices and compare it to the more traditional acquisition of iCloud backups.

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.

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.