Today we have an important date. Advanced Office Password Recovery turned 16. What started as an instant recovery tool for legacy versions of Microsoft Word had now become a GPU-accelerated toolkit for breaking the many Microsoft formats. Today we’re releasing a major update, giving Advanced Office Password Recovery and Distributed Password Recovery tools the ability to crunch passwords faster with the newest and latest NVIDIA 3000-series graphic boards. Powered by Ampere, the new generation of GPUs delivers unprecedented performance in modern video games. How do the new cards fare when it comes to accelerating the password recovery, and is an upgrade worth it for the forensic experts? Let’s find out.

This is the final part of the series of articles comparing Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery with Hashcat. We’ve already compared the features, the price and performance of the two tools. In this study, we tried breaking passwords to several common formats, including Word document, an encrypted ZIP archive, and a VeraCrypt container. We summarized our experiences below.

After publishing the first article in the series, we received numerous comments challenging our claims. We carefully reviewed every comment, reread and reevaluated our original article.  Elcomsoft vs. Hashcat Rev.1.1 is here.

Hashcat is a great, free tool competing head to head with the tools we make. We charge several hundred dollars for what, in the end, can be done with a free tool. What are the reasons for our customers to choose ElcomSoft products instead of Hashcat, and is the expense justified? We did our best to compare the two tools to help you make the informed decision.

Intuit Quicken is one of the oldest tools of its kind. Over the years, Quicken had become the de facto standard for accounting, tax reporting and personal finance management in North America.

Believe me or not, but this is exactly the 500th post in our blog! The first one was posted in March 2009 and was about Distributed Password Recovery and GPU acceleration. At that time, we even did not do mobile or cloud forensics. Today it’s not about our achievements. I want to thank you for being with us, and share a few bits and pieces about our blog that you may find handy or at least amusing.

Remember the good old times when there was a lot of applications with “snake oil” encryption? You know, the kind of “peace of mind” protection that allowed recovering or removing the original plaintext password instantly? It is still the case for a few “we-don’t-care” apps such as QuickBooks 2021, but all of the better tools can no longer be cracked that easily. Let’s review some password recovery strategies used in our software today.

If the iPhone is locked with a passcode, it is considered reasonably secure. The exception are some older devices, which are relatively vulnerable. But what if the passcode is known or is not set? Will it be easy to gain access to all of the data stored in the device? And why do we have the countless forensic tools –is analysis and reporting the sole reason for their existence? Not really. If you’ve been wondering what this acquisition thing is all about, this article is for you.

Today, we have an important date. It’s been 13 years since we invented a technique that reshaped the landscape of modern password recovery. 13 years ago, we introduced GPU acceleration in our then-current password recovery tool, enabling the use of consumer-grade gaming video cards for breaking passwords orders of magnitude faster.

Making tools for breaking passwords, I am frequently asked whether it’s legal, or how it works, or what one can do to protect their password from being cracked. There are people who have “nothing to hide”. There are those wearing tin foil hats, but there are a lot more people who can make a reasonable effort to secure their lives without going overboard. This article is for them.