If you have an Apple device running iOS 18 or iOS 26 and gone looking for the old Get Verification Code option under Settings → [user name] → Sign-In & Security, you’ve probably noticed it’s no longer there. A quick search turns up forum threads, support comments, and even GitHub issues all reaching the same conclusion: Apple removed it. Some posts go further and call it “deprecated” or “Apple’s middle finger to users of older devices.” That conclusion is wrong. The option still exists in iOS 26. It just doesn’t show up the way it used to.

Pulling a backup out of iCloud is one of the more technically demanding jobs in cloud forensics. An iCloud backup is not a single, ready-to-download file; instead, it is assembled from a large number of separate fragments that have to be collected and stitched back together into a coherent backup. Recent changes to Apple’s communication protocols broke things for everyone except Apple themselves, meaning that we had to rework the underlying extraction logic. This is documented in Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 11 Restores iCloud Access.

Over the years, we have published several articles about the extraction agent. However, the underlying technology changes quickly, and incremental changes often have significant cumulative effects. As a result, many of our older posts are no longer relevant and can be misleading if followed to the letter today. While last year’s recap, Installing and Troubleshooting the Extraction Agent (2025), remains a solid foundation for general setup, it does not account for the most recent hardware and software developments. This article serves as the definitive point of reference, providing an up-to-date recap of everything you need to know about the extraction agent as of May 2026.

Extracting cloud data becomes increasingly valuable – and increasingly complex at the same time. In scenarios where a target device is physically unavailable cloud extraction is often the only real way to access evidence. This is particularly relevant when devices are secured by an unknown passcode or locked under Apple’s Stolen Device Protection framework without available biometric authentication, rendering traditional extraction techniques ineffective.

We’ve just updated iOS Forensic Toolkit to version 10.0, significantly expanding its low-level extraction capabilities for both the extraction agent and bootloader-based methods. Previously, agent-based extraction was capped at iOS 16.6.1. This release finally covers the remainder of the iOS 16 branch, and adds support for the entire iOS 17  branch as well as iOS 18 through 18.7.1. We have also expanded checkm8 support to cover all the latest OS updates pushed by Apple on devices susceptible to the exploit. Finally, we improved extended logical acquisition support for iOS/iPadOS 26, now pulling significantly more shared data than before.

The release of the checkm8 exploit was a breakthrough for mobile forensics, finally granting investigators verifiable access to the file systems of various Apple devices. This accessibility established the current “gold standard” for extraction: using the bootloader exploit to access the file system and dump it into a simple tar archive. While convenient, a tar archive is merely a logical copy, not a physical one. It may fail to capture the device’s true state, missing certain low-level nuances. Truth be told, these nuances are rarely relevant to real investigations, but why settle for less when a better method is available? More importantly, this approach avoids the “teething problems” of traditional bootloader extraction – such as the mishandling of large sparse files – that continue to plague even the largest forensic vendors.

Perfect Acquisition is the most reliable method to acquire data from an iOS device. It is completely forensically sound – it doesn’t modify a single bit of the filesystem. When supported, this method should always be used over alternatives. This guide outlines the entire process, from acquiring the data dump to decrypting and mounting it for analysis.

Big news is coming – and this time, it’s from the living room. Our team has successfully extracted a complete file system image from an Apple TV 4K running tvOS 26. This marks the first-ever low-level extraction of Apple’s 26th-generation operating systems, including iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and tvOS 26. No one – not even the major forensic players! – has been able to achieve this before.

Our customers often ask us which exact iOS versions are supported by iOS Forensic Toolkit. There’s always a temptation to answer “all of them,” and while that answer is technically correct, there are a lot of caveats. The devil is in the details, and the real answer depends on what you mean by “support”.

The latest update to iOS Forensic Toolkit brought bootloader-level extraction to a bunch of old iPads, Apple TVs, and even the first-gen HomePod running OS versions 17 and 18. This enabled full file system and keychain extraction on a those older Apple devices that can still run these versions of the OS.