We often write about full file system acquisition, yet we rarely explain what it is, when you can do it, and which methods you can use. We decided to clarify low-level extraction of Apple mobile devices (iPhones and iPads, and some other IoT devices such as Apple TVs and Apple Watches).

Today’s data protection methods utilize many thousands (sometimes millions) hash iterations to strengthen password protection, slowing down the attacks to a crawl. Consumer-grade video cards are commonly used for GPU acceleration. How do these video cards compare, and what about the price-performance ratio? We tested five reasonably priced NVIDIA boards ranging from the lowly GTX 1650 to RTX 3060 Ti.

Speaking of mobile devices, especially Apple’s, “logical acquisition” is probably the most misused term. Are you sure you know what it is and how to properly use it, especially if you are working in mobile forensics? Let us shed some light on it.

The ninth beta of iOS Forensic Toolkit 8.0 for Mac introduces forensically sound, checkm8-based extraction of sixteen iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV models. The low-level extraction solution is now available for all iPad and all iPod Touch models susceptible to the checkm8 exploit.

iOS Forensic Toolkit 7.40 brings gapless low-level extraction support for several iOS versions up to and including iOS 15.1 (15.1.1 on some devices), adding compatibility with previously unsupported versions of iOS 14.

Live system analysis is the easiest and often the only way to access encrypted data stored on BitLocker-protected disks. In this article we’ll discuss the available options for extracting BitLocker keys from authenticated sessions during live system analysis.

In Alder Lake, Intel introduced hybrid architecture. Large, hyperthreading-enabled Performance cores are complemented with smaller, single-thread Efficiency cores. The host OS is responsible for assigning threads to one core or another. We discovered that Windows 10 scheduler is not doing a perfect job when it comes to password recovery, which requires a careful approach to thread scheduling.

The seventh beta of iOS Forensic Toolkit 8.0 for Mac introduces passcode unlock and forensically sound checkm8 extraction of iPhone 4s, iPad 2 and 3. The new solution employs a Raspberry Pi Pico board to apply the exploit. Learn how to configure and use the Pico microcontroller for extracting an iPhone 4s!

While we continue working on the major update to iOS Forensic Toolkit with forensically sound checkm8 extraction, we keep updating the current release branch. iOS Forensic Toolkit 7.30 brings low-level file system extraction support for iOS 15.1, expanding the ability to perform full file system extraction on iOS devices ranging from the iPhone 8 through iPhone 13 Pro Max.

Regular or disposable Apple IDs can now be used to extract data from compatible iOS devices if you have a Mac. The use of a non-developer Apple ID carries certain risks and restrictions. In particular, one must “verify” the extraction agent on the target iPhone, which requires an active Internet connection. Learn how to verify the extraction agent signed with a regular or disposable Apple ID without the risk of receiving an accidental remote lock or remote erase command.