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.
Discounts and Novelties From Our ElcomShop!
February 5th, 2016 by Olga Koksharova
Dear friends, here we come with a set of novelties from our ElcomShop. We’ve made a few new designs and added new fancy products, such as long sleeve shirts for girls and baseball caps for boys and separately for dads 🙂 and mugs for everyone. All company designs applied to a wide and varied range of products can be found in our shop window.
Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 5.20: Direct iCloud Access and iOS 9.3 Support
February 4th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
Apple is currently testing a new major iOS release, the iOS 9.3. At this time, the second beta version is available. We looked into what has changed in the new OS, and discovered that iOS 9.3 introduces some minor changes to encryption of certain data stored in cloud backups. However minor, these changes effectively prevented older versions of Elcomsoft Phone Breaker from decrypting the data, which made us release an update ASAP. In addition, we were able to discover and fix the issue with some iOS 9.2 backups not properly decrypting (which wasn’t easy since the issue was intermittent). Finally, we got rid of the requirement to have iCloud for Windows installed as Elcomsoft Phone Breaker shifts to using direct access API.
This is to say, we have now updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to fully support the new encryption mechanisms used in iOS 9.3 iCloud backups. In addition, we fixed the ongoing issue some of our users were experiencing when accessing iCloud backups produced by iOS 9.2.
Hacking For Dummies by Kevin Beaver (5th edition)
January 29th, 2016 by Olga Koksharova
It is our greatest pleasure to recommend the newest edition of “Hacking For Dummies” by Kevin Beaver, an independent IT security consultant, a practical guide on computer and mobile security updated to the current state of industry. With a natural talent of word Kevin easily guides you through security issues in a very clear and consistent manner, so that all major aspects of IT security, authentication and pen-testing are covered. With such a harmonious and sequential unveiling of security subjects as in this book, it is much easier to dig deeper into particular questions of your own interest.
Forensic Acquisition: Android
January 29th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
While here at ElcomSoft we offer a limited range of tools for acquiring Android devices that’s pretty much limited to over-the-air acquisition, we are still often approached with questions when one should use cloud extraction, and when other acquisition methods should be used. In this article, we decided to sum up our experience in acquiring the various Android devices, explaining why we decided to go for a cloud acquisition tool instead of implementing the many physical and logical extraction methods. This article is a general summary of available acquisition methods for the various makes, models, chipsets and OS versions of Android smartphones. The article is not intended to be a technical guide; instead, it’s supposed to give you a heads-up on approaching Android acquisition.
Google Timeline: How Law Enforcement Can Use Google Data
January 25th, 2016 by Vladimir Katalov
As we all know, Google collects and processes an awful lot of data about pretty much everyone who is using the company’s cloud services or owns a smartphone running the Android OS (or, to be precise, is using a device with Google Mobile Services). Just how much data is available was described in our previous article, What Google Knows about You, and Why It Matters. Today, we’ll discuss something slightly different. Meet Google Timeline, a relatively new feature extending the company’s Maps service.
What Google Knows About You, and Why It Matters
December 22nd, 2015 by Vladimir Katalov
In today’s thoroughly connected world, everyone shares at least some of their personal information with, well, strangers. Voluntarily or not, people using personal computers or mobile devices have some of their information transmitted to, processed, stored and used by multiple online service providers.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery Updated with OS X Keychain Support and Enhanced GPU Acceleration
November 26th, 2015 by Vladimir Katalov
We’ve recently updated Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, adding enhanced GPU-assisted recovery for many supported formats. In a word, the new release adds GPU-accelerated recovery for OS X keychain, triples BitLocker recovery speeds, improves W-Fi password recovery and enhances GPU acceleration support for Internet Key Exchange (IKE).
A New Tool for WhatsApp Acquisition
November 25th, 2015 by Vladimir Katalov
We have recently released a brand new product, Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp. Targeted at home users and forensic experts along, this Windows-based, iOS-centric tool offers a bunch of extraction options for WhatsApp databases. Why the new tool, and how is it different from other extraction options offered by Elsomsoft’s mobile forensic tools? Before we move on to that, let’s have a look at the current state of WhatsApp.
Physical Acquisition for 64-bit Devices, iOS 9 Support
November 18th, 2015 by Vladimir Katalov
Big news! iOS Forensic Toolkit receives its first major update. And it’s a big one. Not only does version 2.0 bring support for iOS 9 handys. We also expanded acquisition support for jailbroken devices, enabling limited data extraction from jailbroken devices locked with an unknown passcode.
Extracting Data from Locked iPhones
November 13th, 2015 by Vladimir Katalov
With hardware-backed full-disk encryption and additional protection of sensitive user data located in the keychain, Apple iOS is the most secure mobile operating system out there. Acquisition approaches that are traditional for Android and Windows Phone devices (namely, JTAG, ISP and chip-off) are completely meaningless for iOS devices running even years-old generations of the system. Bypassing screen lock password (passcode) has also been long considered to be useless due to the fact user data stored in the keychain is additionally encrypted with a secure key based on the passcode.
