What’s New in Elcomsoft System Recovery 8.34: More Data, Faster Imaging, BitLocker Key Extraction
April 29th, 2025 by Oleg Afonin
We updated Elcomsoft System Recovery to version 8.34. This release focuses on expanding the tool’s data acquisition capabilities, improving disk imaging performance, and adding BitLocker recovery key extraction for systems managed via Active Directory. Here’s a technical breakdown of the changes.
ElcomSoft Extracts Deleted Safari Browsing History from iCloud
February 9th, 2017 by Vladimir Katalov
Your browsing history represents your habits. You are what you read, and your browsing history reflects that. Your Google searches, visits to news sites, activities in blogs and forums, shopping, banking, communications in social networks and other Web-based activities can picture your daily activities. It could be that the browsing history is the most intimate part of what they call “online privacy”. You wouldn’t want your browsing history become public, would you?
How to Break 30 Per Cent of Passwords in Seconds
February 6th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
This article opens a new series dedicated to breaking passwords. It’s no secret that simply getting a good password recovery tool is not enough to successfully break a given password. Brute-force attacks are inefficient for modern formats (e.g. encrypted Office 2013 documents), while using general dictionaries can still be too much for speedy attacks and too little to actually work. In this article, we’ll discuss the first of the two relatively unknown vectors of attack that can potentially break 30 to 70 per cent of real-world passwords in a matter of minutes. The second method will be described in the follow-up article.
Extracting WhatsApp Conversations from Android Smartphones
February 2nd, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
As you may already know, we’ve added Android support to our WhatsApp acquisition tool, Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp. While the updated tool can now extract WhatsApp communication histories directly from Android smartphones with or without root access, how do you actually use it, and how does it work? In this blog post we’ll be looking into the technical detail and learn how to use the tool.
iOS 10 Physical Acquisition with Yalu Jailbreak
January 30th, 2017 by Vladimir Katalov
Note: we recommend disabling Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity on the device you are acquiring. In addition, disable Wi-Fi on all other iOS devices connected to the same network as your computer.
How Can I Break Into a Locked iOS 10 iPhone?
January 26th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
Each iteration of iOS is getting more secure. With no jailbreak available for the current version of iOS, what acquisition methods are available for the iPhone 7, 7 Plus and other devices updating to iOS 10? How does the recent update of Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit help extracting a locked iOS 10 iPhone? Read along to find out!
Who and Why Spies on Android Users, And What They Do With the Data
January 25th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
If you’ve been following the news, you may already know about the many cases where companies, big and small, were caught spying on their users. It might appear that just about everyone making a phone or an app is after your personal information. In this article we’ll try to figure out who collects your personal data, why they do it and what they do with the data they collect.
Inside ElcomSoft Lab. Part 1
January 20th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
Staying on the bleeding edge of today’s technologies requires constant work. ElcomSoft lab is one of the busiest places in the company. Last year, we had dozens of devices passing through our lab. This publication opens the series of articles in which we’ll share insider’s information on what we do, what we are about to do, and how we do that. So let’s shed some light on what’s going on inside ElcomSoft lab.
Fingerprint Readers in pre-Android 6 Smartphones: A Call for Disaster
January 19th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
Back in 2013, Apple has added a fingerprint reader to its then new iPhone 5s. Around that time, OEMs manufacturing Android devices have also started equipping their devices with fingerprint sensors. It turned out that Apple and Android OEMs came to severely different results. In this article, we’ll have a look at fingerprint reader implementations in pre-Marshmallow Android devices and see why they were a terrible idea.
Government Request Reports: Google, Apple and Microsoft
January 16th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
Every once in a while, hi-tech companies release reports on government requests that they received and served (or not). The different companies receive a different number of requests. They don’t treat them the same way, and they don’t report them the same way, which makes the comparison difficult. In this article, we’ll try to analyze and compare government request reports published by Apple, Google and Microsoft.
FBI Can Unlock Most Devices They Need To
December 29th, 2016 by Vladimir Katalov
According to Jim Baker, FBI General Counsel, the bureau can access information on most smartphones they are dealing with, even if encryption is enabled. In this article, we tried to find out which devices they can and cannot unlock, and why.
