Intelligent Load Balancing: Optimizing Password Recovery Across Heterogeneous Units
November 14th, 2024 by Oleg Afonin
In the latest update of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery (EDPR), we’ve introduced a revamped load-balancing feature. The new feature aims to enhance resource utilization on local workstations across diverse hardware configurations. This update has drastically reduced the time required to break passwords in certain hardware configurations, thanks to a refined load distribution algorithm. In this article, we’ll share some technical details on how load balancing leverages a mix of GPUs and CPU cores.
Why SSDs Die a Sudden Death (and How to Deal with It)
January 18th, 2019 by Oleg Afonin
Many thanks to Roman Morozov, ACELab technical support specialist, for sharing his extensive knowledge and expertise and for all the time he spent ditching bugs in this article.
Life after Trim: Using Factory Access Mode for Imaging SSD Drives
January 16th, 2019 by Oleg Afonin
Many thanks to Roman Morozov, ACELab technical support specialist, for sharing his extensive knowledge and expertise and for all the time he spent ditching bugs in this article.
A New Method for Decrypting WhatsApp Backups
December 20th, 2018 by Vladimir Katalov
WhatsApp remains one of the most popular instant messengers. With more than 1.5 billion users and about half billion daily active users, WhatsApp sends over 100 billion messages per day. WhatsApp is secure thanks to end-to-end encryption to make intercepted messages impossible to decrypt. While this is great news to consumers and privacy advocates, it is also bad news for the law enforcement. Once an expert accepts to access the suspect’s WhatsApp communication history, they will struggle with the encryption and demand for a vendor-provided backdoor (WhatsApp: The Bad Guys’ Secret Weapon).
Six Ways to Decrypt iPhone Passwords from the Keychain
December 18th, 2018 by Vladimir Katalov
In Apple’s world, the keychain is one of the core and most secure components of macOS, iOS and its derivatives such as watchOS and tvOS. The keychain is intended to keep the user’s most valuable secrets securely protected. This includes protection for authentication tokens, encryption keys, credit card data and a lot more. End users are mostly familiar with one particular feature of the keychain: the ability to store all kinds of passwords. This includes passwords to Web sites (Safari and third-party Web browsers), mail accounts, social networks, instant messengers, bank accounts and just about everything else. Some records (such as Wi-Fi passwords) are “system-wide”, while other records can be only accessed by their respective apps. iOS 12 further develops password auto-fill, allowing users to utilize passwords they stored in Safari in many third-party apps.
How to Reset or Recover Windows SYSKEY Passwords
December 7th, 2018 by Oleg Afonin
Some 22 years ago, Microsoft made an attempt to make Windows more secure by adding an extra layer of protection. The SAM Lock Tool, commonly known as SYSKEY (the name of its executable file), was used to encrypt the content of the Windows Security Account Manager (SAM) database. The encryption was using a 128-bit RC4 encryption key.
Can Forensic Experts Keep Up with the Digital Age?
December 5th, 2018 by Vladimir Katalov
The boom in personal electronic devices recording literally every persons’ step introduced a new type of forensic evidence: the digital evidence. In this day and age, significantly more forensic evidence is available in digital form compared to physical evidence of yesteryear. Are law enforcement and intelligence agencies ready to handle the abundance of digital evidence? And more importantly, do frontline officers have the skills and technical expertise required to handle and preserve this wealth of information?
Apple Health Is the Next Big Thing: Health, Cloud and Security
November 29th, 2018 by Vladimir Katalov
Health data is among the most important bits of information about a person. Health information is just as sensitive as the person’s passwords – and might be even more sensitive. It is only natural that health information is treated accordingly. Medical facilities are strictly regulated and take every possible security measure to restrict access to your medical records.
Extracting Apple Health Data from iCloud
November 29th, 2018 by Oleg Afonin
Heartrate, sleeping habits, workouts, steps and walking routines are just a few things that come to mind when we speak of Apple Health. Introduced in September 2014 with iOS 8, the Apple Health app is pre-installed on all iPhones. The app makes use of low-energy sensors, constantly collecting information about the user’s physical activities. With optional extra hardware (e.g. Apple Watch), Apple Health can collect significantly more information. In this article we’ll talk about the types of evidence collected by Apple Health, how they are stored and how to extract the data.
Messages in iCloud: How to Extract Full Content Including Media Files, Locations and Documents
November 15th, 2018 by Oleg Afonin
In today’s usage scenarios, messaging are not entirely about the text. Users exchange pictures and short videos, voice recordings and their current locations. These types of data are an important part of conversation histories; they can be just as valuable evidence as the text content of the chat.
iMessage Security, Encryption and Attachments
November 15th, 2018 by Vladimir Katalov
iMessage is undoubtedly one of the most popular instant messaging platforms for an obvious reason: it’s built in to iOS and ships with every iPhone by default. iMessage does not require complex setup, so the number of iMessage users is closely matching the number of iPhone users. Apple sells about 200 million iPhones every year, and the total number of iPhones sold is more than a billion. Unless you absolutely must chat with someone outside of Apple’s ecosystem (like those poor Android folks), you won’t need Skype, WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s also comforting to know that iMessage works everywhere around the world while most other messengers are oppressed in one or more countries.
