Eighteen Years of GPU Acceleration
November 27th, 2025 by Oleg Afonin
Eighteen years ago, before “GPU acceleration” and “AI data center” became household terms, a small hi-tech company changed the rules of cryptography. In 2007, we unveiled a radical idea – using the untapped power of graphics processors to recover passwords, which coincided with the release of video cards capable of performing fixed-point calculations. What began as an experiment would soon redefine performance computing across nearly every field.
iCloud Outage, New Token Expiration Rules and Fixes for Authentication Issues
July 11th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
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.
Cloud Extraction Compared: What Is Available in iCloud, Google Account and Microsoft Account
July 6th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
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.
Elcomsoft Phone Breaker Offers Over-the-Air Windows 10 Acquisition
June 19th, 2017 by Vladimir Katalov
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.
Fetching Call Logs, Browsing History and Location Data from Microsoft Accounts
June 16th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
In other blog post, we discussed the updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker that allows extracting search and browsing history, location data and call logs from users’ Microsoft Accounts. Now let’s talk about the origins of this data and how to enable its collection on different devices – even if they don’t run Microsoft Windows.
The New Google Authentication Engine in Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer 1.31
June 15th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
As you may know, we have recently updated Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, bumping the version number from 1.30 to 1.31. A very minor update? A bunch of unnamed bug fixes and performance improvements? Not really. Under the hood, the new release has major changes that will greatly affect usage experience. What exactly has changed and why, and what are the forensic implications of these changes? Bear with us to find out.
Android Encryption Demystified
May 23rd, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
How many Android handsets are encrypted, and how much protection does Android encryption actually provide? With Android Nougat accounting for roughly 7% of the market, the chance of not being adequately protected is still high for an average Android user.
We Did It Again: Deleted Notes Extracted from iCloud
May 19th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
As we already know, Apple syncs many types of data across devices that share the same Apple ID. Calls logs, contacts, Safari tabs and browsing history, favorites and notes can be synced. The syncing mechanism supposedly synchronizes newly created, edited and deleted items. These synchronizations work near instantly with little or no delay.
On Apple iCloud security and ‘deleted’ notes
May 19th, 2017 by Vladimir Katalov
Apple, it’s not funny anymore.
ElcomSoft vs. The Cloud: a Game of Cat and Mouse
May 12th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
We’ve got a few forensic tools for getting data off the cloud, with Apple iCloud and Google Account being the biggest two. Every once in a while, the cloud owners (Google and Apple) make changes to their protocols or authentication mechanisms, or employ additional security measures to prevent third-party access to user accounts. Every time this happens, we try to push a hotfix as soon as possible, sometimes in just a day or two. In this article, we’ll try to address our customers’ major concerns, give detailed explanations on what’s going on with cloud access, and provide our predictions on what could happen in the future.
Extracting Text Messages from Google Accounts
April 26th, 2017 by Oleg Afonin
Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer 1.30 can now pull SMS (text) messages straight off the cloud, and offers enhanced location processing with support for Routes and Places. In this article, we’ll have a close look at the new features and get detailed instructions on how to use them. The first article will discuss the text messages, while enhanced location data will be covered in the one that follows.
