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.
Extracting the iPhone: (No) Tools Required?
October 27th, 2020 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
13 Years of GPU Acceleration
October 22nd, 2020 by Oleg Afonin
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.
iOS Extraction Without a Jailbreak: Finally, Zero-Gap Coverage for iOS 9 through iOS 13.5 on All Devices
October 21st, 2020 by Oleg Afonin
We have plugged the last gap in the range of iOS builds supported on the iPhone 5s and 6. The full file system extraction and keychain decryption is now possible on these devices regardless of the version of iOS they are running – at least if that’s iOS 9 or newer. For all other iOS devices up to and including the iPhone 11 Pro Max, we can extract them without a jailbreak if they are running iOS 9 through 13.5 without exceptions. Read how we made this possible.
The Rise of the Virtual Machines
October 20th, 2020 by Vladimir Katalov
Criminals are among the most advanced users of modern technology. They learned how to hide information in their smartphones and how to encrypt their laptops. They communicate via secure channels. Their passwords never leak, and they do their best to leave no traces. Forensic investigators encounter new challenges every other day. In this article, we will discuss yet another tool used by the criminals to cover their traces: the encrypted virtual machine.
Ruling Out the Encryption
October 20th, 2020 by Oleg Afonin
We all have habits. Morning coffee (no sugar, just some milk), two eggs (sunny side up), reading mail wile you are not completely awaken, and a lot more. We all follow some kind of rules we have set for ourselves. We all have some favorites: names, cities and even numbers; maybe an important date or place. Can we exploit people’s habits to break their passwords effectively instead of using brute force? We can, and here’s the how-to.
Breaking Encrypted Virtual Machines: Recovering VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox Passwords
October 20th, 2020 by Oleg Afonin
Virtual machines use a portable, hardware-independent environment to perform essentially the same role as an actual computer. Activities performed under the virtual umbrella leave trails mostly in the VM image files and not on the host computer. The ability to analyze virtual machines becomes essential when performing digital investigations.
Everything You Wanted to Ask About Cracking Passwords
October 15th, 2020 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
Stick It To The Man
October 9th, 2020 by Kevin Mitnick
The year was 2008, and I had been staying at a hotel in Bogota. This trip was just one of many to Columbia that year. Before my trip, I’d had my former girlfriend, Darci, stop by and help me swap out the hard drive in my MacBook Pro laptop. Remember, this is 2008, and at the time, replacing a drive in a MacBook Pro wasn’t nearly as easy as replacing hard drives these days. Darci swapped out my original hard drive with a brand-new drive, which I then formatted and installed macOS. I had her swap the drive out for security reasons. I didn’t want to cross the border into a foreign country with all of my client data. Especially not after what happened to me in Atlanta! But we’ll get to that later.
Apple Mobile Devices Cheat Sheet
October 6th, 2020 by Vladimir Katalov
When investigating iOS devices, you may have seen references to the SoC generation. Security researchers and developers of various iOS jailbreaks and exploits often list a few iPhone models followed by a note that mentions “compatible iPad models”. This is especially common when discussing iOS forensics, particularly referring to the checkra1n jailbreak. What do those references mean, and how are the iPhone and iPad models related? Can we count the iPod Touch and Apple TV, too? Let’s have a look.
Mobile Forensics: Are You Ready for iOS 14?
October 5th, 2020 by Vladimir Katalov
The number of iOS 14 users is on the raise, and we will see it running on most Apple devices pretty soon. Apple had already stopped signing the last version of iOS 13 on all but legacy hardware. Soon, we will only see it running on the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6 which didn’t get the update, and on a small fraction of newer devices. If you are working in the forensic field, what do you need to do to make yourself ready for iOS 14? Our software may help.
