For many months, a working jailbreak was not available for current versions of iOS. In the end of July, Pangu released public jailbreak for iOS 9.2-9.3.3. A few days ago, Apple patched the exploit and started seeding iOS 9.3.4. This was the shortest-living jailbreak in history.

Just now, we’ve updated Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer to version 1.10. This new release adds the ability to download email messages from the user’s Gmail account for offline analysis. In order to do that, we had to develop a highly specialized email client. We opted to use Google’s proprietary Gmail API to download mail. In this article, we’ll explain our decision and detail the benefits you’ll be getting by choosing a tool that can talk to Gmail in Gmail language. 

Not all passwords provide equal protection. Some formats are more resistant to brute-force attacks than others. As an example, Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 employ a smart encryption scheme that is very slow to decrypt. Even the fastest available GPU units found in NVIDIA’s latest GeForce GTX 1080 will only allow trying some 7100 passwords per second.

How often do you think forensic specialists have to deal with encrypted containers? Compared with office documents and archives that are relatively infrequent, every second case involves an encrypted container. It may vary, but these evaluations are based on a real survey conducted by our company.

In the world of Windows dominance, Apple’s Mac OS X enjoys a healthy market share of 9.5% among desktop operating systems. The adoption of Apple’s desktop OS (macOS seems to be the new name) is steadily growing. This is why we are targeting Mac OS with our tools.

During the last several years, progress on the CPU performance front has seemingly stopped. Granted, last-generation CPUs are cool, silent and power-efficient. Anecdotal evidence: my new laptop (a brand new Macbook) is about as fast as the Dell ultrabook it replaced. The problem? I bought the Dell laptop some five years ago. Granted, the Dell was thicker and noisier. It’s battery never lasted longer than a few hours. But it was about as fast as the new Macbook.

We have a bunch of mobile forensic tools. We have tools for extracting data from jailbroken iPhones and tools for decrypting password-protected backups. Tools for downloading data from iCloud and tools for analyzing user data mined by Google. We even have a tool for decrypting backups produced by BlackBerry 10, one of the most secure OS’es on the market.

As you may already know, we’ve released an update to Elcomsoft System Recovery, a tool allowing to reset or recover Windows and Microsoft Account passwords by booting from an external USB drive. The new build allows creating bootable USB drives for devices exclusively relying on UEFI bootloaders. Why was this change needed? Read below for an answer!

BitLocker is a popular full-disk encryption scheme employed in all versions of Windows (but not in every edition) since Windows Vista. BitLocker is used to protect stationary and removable volumes against outside attacks. Since Windows 8, BitLocker is activated by default on compatible devices if the administrative account logs in with Microsoft Account credentials. BitLocker protection is extremely robust, becoming a real roadblock for digital forensics.