AI-Driven Password Recovery: Myth or Reality?
July 8th, 2025 by Oleg Afonin
Artificial intelligence is everywhere – from phones that guess your next move to fridges that shop for you. It’s only natural to ask whether AI can help in a more serious domain: digital forensics, specifically password cracking. The idea sounds promising: use large language models (LLMs) to produce rules and templates for guessing highly probable password variants, prioritizing the most likely ones first. But in practice, things aren’t so straightforward.
Breaking Wi-Fi Passwords with NVIDIA Ampere
April 12th, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
The supply of NVIDIA’s latest and greatest RTX 3000 series boards remains scarce due to production shortages and increased demand from gamers and cryptocurrency miners. That didn’t stop us from giving these cards yet another purpose: breaking Wi-Fi passwords.
Breaking RAR5 and 7Zip Passwords
April 6th, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
The recent update to Elcomsoft Advanced Archive Password Recovery, our go-to tool for breaking passwords to encrypted archives, brought compatibility with RAR5 and 7Zip formats, and enabled multithreaded dictionary attacks. Which archive formats are the most secure, and which ones are the toughest to break? Read along to find out!
Breaking the iPhone 12: Forensic Extraction of iOS 14 Devices
March 18th, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
iOS Forensic Toolkit 7.0 brings low-level extraction support for the latest generation of Apple devices. This includes the entire range of iPhone 12 models as well as all other devices capable of running iOS 14.0 to 14.3. Learn how to image the latest iPhone models without a jailbreak.
iOS Recovery Mode Analysis: Reading iOS Version from Locked and Disabled iPhones
February 18th, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
The iPhone recovery mode has limited use for mobile forensics. However, even the limited amount of information available through recovery mode can be essential for an investigation. Recovery access can be also the only available analysis method if the device becomes unusable, is locked or disabled after ten unsuccessful unlocking attempts, or had entered the USB restricted mode. Learn how to enter and leave Recovery and what information you can obtain in this mode.
Breaking Jetico BestCrypt
February 3rd, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
BestCrypt, developed by the Finnish company Jetico, is a cross-platform commercial disk encryption tool. Available for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android platforms, BestCrypt is delivered in two editions, one offering full-disk encryption and the other encrypting virtual disk volumes stored in containers, the latter being supported with our tools.
Passcode Unlock and Physical Acquisition of iPhone 4, 5 and 5c
February 2nd, 2021 by Vladimir Katalov
Passcode unlock and true physical acquisition are now available for iPhone 4, 5, and 5c devices – with caveats. Learn about the benefits and limitations of passcode unlocks and true physical imaging of Apple’s legacy devices. Looking for a step by step walkthrough? Check out our imaging guide!
iPhone 4, iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c Physical Acquisition Walkthrough
February 2nd, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
True physical acquisition is back – but only for a handful of old devices. We’re adding support for unlocking and forensically sound extraction of some of Apple’s legacy iPhones. For iPhone 4, 5, and 5c devices, we’re adding software-based passcode unlocking and device imaging functionality. Moreover, on some models you won’t even need to break the passcode in order to make a full disk image! In this walkthrough we’ll describe the steps required to image an iPhone 4, iPhone 5 or iPhone 5c device.
NAS Forensics: Synology, ASUSTOR, QNAP, TerraMaster and Thecus Encryption Compared
February 1st, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
More than a year ago, we started researching the available encryption options in off the shelf network attached storage devices. We started with Synology devices, followed by Asustor, TerraMaster, Thecus, and finally Qnap. The manufacturers exhibit vastly different approaches to data protection, with different limitations, security implications and vulnerabilities. Today we are publishing the aggregate results of our analysis.
End-to-End Encryption in Apple iCloud, Google and Microsoft Accounts
January 21st, 2021 by Oleg Afonin
The proliferation of always connected, increasingly smart devices had led to a dramatic increase in the amount of highly sensitive information stored in manufacturers’ cloud accounts. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the three major cloud providers who also develop their own hardware and OS ecosystems. In this report, we’ll see how these companies protect their users’ highly sensitive information compared to each other.
Secure Instant Messengers
January 19th, 2021 by Olga Koksharova
In today’s world of everyone wanting a slice of one’s personal information, users become more and more concerned about the privacy. The WhatsApp/Facebook integration raised an additional concern, considering that Facebook-owned Messenger requests the largest number of invasive permissions among all commonly used messengers. Data privacy and security concerns are mounting like a snowball. 2020 brought multiple data breach incidents from popular blogging resources from LiveJournal whose users’ data was breached and leaked to the darknet to financial institutions like Postbank with 12M exposed credit cards, hospitality giants as Mariott with 383 million records compromised or even Microsoft customers who also suffered from privacy-related issues.
