Who needs access to iCloud Keychain, and why? The newly released Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 7.0 adds a single major feature that allows experts extracting, decrypting and viewing information stored in Apple’s protected storage. There are so many ifs and buts such as needing the user’s Apple ID and password, accessing their i-device or knowing a secret security code that one may legitimately wonder: what is it all about? Let’s find out about iCloud Keychain, why it’s so difficult to crack, and why it can be important for the expert.

In today’s world, everything is stored in the cloud. Your backups can be stored in the cloud. The “big brother” knows where you had lunch yesterday and how long you’ve been there. Your photos can back up to the cloud, as well as your calls and messages. Finally, your passwords are also stored online – at least if you don’t disable iCloud Keychain. Let’s follow the history of Apple iCloud, its most known hacks and our own forensic efforts.

We received some great feedback on the original article about attacking master passwords of several popular password managers. In one discussion, our benchmark numbers for 1Password were questioned. We had no choice but to re-run the benchmarks and publish an updated chart along with some technical details and explanations. We bring our apologies to AgileBits, the developers of 1Password, for letting the wrong number creep in to our benchmark. Can we still break into 1Password by attacking the master password? Please bear with us for up-to-date information and detailed technical discussion.

Cloud services such as Amazon EC2 can quickly deliver additional computing power on demand. Amazon’s recent introduction of the a type of EC2 Compute Units made this proposition much more attractive than ever before. With Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery now supporting Amazon’s new P2 instances, each with up to 16 GPU units, users can get as much speed as they need the moment they need. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of using cloud compute units for password recovery, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to add virtual instances to Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery. (more…)

Facebook-owned WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging tool worldwide. Due to its point-to-point encryption, WhatsApp is an extremely tough target to extract.

WhatsApp is one of the most secure messengers with full end-to-end encryption. Messages exchanged between WhatsApp users are using an encrypted point-to-point communication protocol rendering man-in-the-middle attacks useless. WhatsApp communications are never stored or backed up on WhatsApp servers. All this makes government snooping on WhatsApp users increasingly difficult.

…dead? Not really, not completely, and not for every device. We’ve just updated iOS Forensic Toolkit to add physical support for some previously unsupported combinations of hardware (32-bit devices) and software (iOS 9.1 through 9.3.4). The intent was helping our law enforcement and forensic customers clear some of the backlog, finally taking care of evidence kept on dusty shelves in the back room. In order to do the extraction, you’ll need to install the “Home Depot” jailbreak from http://wall.supplies and, obviously, Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit 2.30.

In early July, 2017, Apple has once again revised security measures safeguarding iCloud backups. This time around, the company has altered the lifespan of iCloud authentication tokens, making them just as short-lived as they used to be immediately after celebgate attacks. How this affects your ability to access iCloud data, which rules apply to iCloud tokens, for how long you can still use the tokens and how this affected regular users will be the topic of this article.

There are three major mobile operating systems, and three major cloud services. Most Android users are deep into the Google’s ecosystem. iCloud is an essential part of iOS, while cloud services provided by Microsoft under the OneDrive umbrella are used not only by the few Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile customers but by users of other mobile and desktop platforms.

We’ve just updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to version 6.60, adding remote acquisition support for Microsoft Windows 10 phones and desktops. The new build can pull search and Web browsing history, call logs, and location history directly from the user’s Microsoft Account. In this article we’ll have a look at what exactly is available and can be extracted and where this information is stored. We will also list the steps required to extract and view the data.