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!

If you’ve been following the news, you may already know about the many cases where companies, big and small, were caught spying on their users. It might appear that just about everyone making a phone or an app is after your personal information. In this article we’ll try to figure out who collects your personal data, why they do it and what they do with the data they collect.

According to Jim Baker, FBI General Counsel, the bureau can access information on most smartphones they are dealing with, even if encryption is enabled. In this article, we tried to find out which devices they can and cannot unlock, and why.

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.

Two-factor authentication is great when it comes to securing access to someone’s account. It’s not so great when it gets in the way of accessing your account. However, in emergency situations things can turn completely ugly. In this article we’ll discuss steps you can do to minimize the negative consequences of using two-factor authentication if you lose access to your trusted device and your trusted phone number. In order to keep the size of this text reasonable we’ll only talk about Apple’s implementation, namely Two-Step Verification and Two-Factor Authentication. You can read more about those in our previous blog post.

In this article we’ll discuss the differences between implementations of two-factor authentication in popular mobile platforms. We’ll research how two-factor authentication is implemented in Android, iOS and Windows 10 Mobile, and discuss usability and security implications of each implementation.

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.

The previous article was about the theory. In this part we’ll go directly to practice. If you possess a turned on and locked iOS device and have no means of unlocking it with either Touch ID or passcode, you may still be able to obtain a backup via the process called logical acquisition. While logical acquisition may return somewhat less information compared to the more advanced physical acquisition, it must be noted that physical acquisition may not be available at all on a given device.

Good news: Apple has officially responded.

In our previous article, we figured that iPhone call logs are synced with iCloud. We performed multiple additional tests to try to understand exactly how it works, and are trying to guess why. (more…)