Forensic Implications of BitLocker-by-Default in Windows 11 24H2

May 8th, 2025 by Oleg Afonin

The Windows 11 24H2 update introduced a change in Microsoft’s approach to disk encryption, a shift that will have long lasting implications on digital forensics. In this release, BitLocker encryption is automatically enabled on most modern hardware when installing Windows when a Microsoft Account (MSA) is used during setup. Encryption starts seamlessly and silently in the background, covering even Home editions and consumer devices such as desktop computers that historically escaped full-disk encryption defaults.

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ElcomSoft Opens a Password Store to Sell Passwords Balancing Strength and Memorability

April 1st, 2011 by Olga Koksharova

Great news, ElcomSoft starts Elcomsoft Password Store, an online service to supply customers with guaranteed secure passwords. The new Password Store provides customers a variety of selections, and complies with all industrial and government requirements regarding the length and complexity of passwords being sold. As a value-added service, the company offers near-instant recovery of all passwords sold through its Password Store for a nominal fee.

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Cracking BlackBerry backups is now slower… but still possible, thx to GPU acceleration

December 24th, 2010 by Vladimir Katalov

If you have read our recent Cracking BlackBerry Backup Passwords article, you should be familiar with encryption implemented in BlackBerry Desktop Software. Just reminding:

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BlackBerry password cracking: multi-threaded, with hardware-accelerated AES

December 9th, 2010 by Vladimir Katalov

Most modern CPUs are multi-core – it is not easy to find even a laptop with less than two cores these days. And for desktops, 4 cores are usual now.

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Canon cannot or mustn’t provide image validation feature?

November 30th, 2010 by Olga Koksharova

A true security system cannot be so fragile: Canon Original Data Security broken…

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Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome Passwords Cracked

November 11th, 2010 by Olga Koksharova

What is a Web browser for you? It’s virtually a whole world, all together: web sites, blogging, photo and video sharing, social networks, instant messaging, shopping… did I forget anything? Oh yes, logins and passwords. 🙂  Set an account here, sign in there, register here and sing up there – everywhere you need logins and passwords to confirm your identity.

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Hacking For Dummies, 3rd Edition by Kevin Beaver

November 2nd, 2010 by Olga Koksharova

Although this new book is on sale from January this year, we are happy to officially say our words of gratitude to Kevin Beaver and advise it to you.

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Smartphone Forensics: Cracking BlackBerry Backup Passwords

September 30th, 2010 by Vladimir Katalov

BlackBerry dominates the North American smartphone market, enjoying almost 40 per cent market share. A 20 per cent worldwide market share isn’t exactly a bad thing, too. The total subscriber base for the BlackBerry platform is more than 50 million users.

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Mind your passwords, make them different

September 17th, 2010 by Olga Koksharova

XKCD posted quite nice comics with a reallife problem behind them. It is very likely that some Web-services do as described, either sell such info to third parties or use it for evil purposes. Our recommendation is if you cannot trust some of the websites, choose another unique password for them. It would be even wiser if you had different passwords for all websites you visit. Some even unimportant websites can aslo be cracked and even if they (better to say your data stored there) have no value at all, your password, can be tried for Facebook or LinkedIn, hopefully in vain.

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iPhone 4 Performance

September 15th, 2010 by Andrey Belenko

Finally, we’ve got our first iPhone 4 in office. And what was the first thing we did with it? Yes, test its performance to complete table in my previous post.

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Measuring iPhone Performance

August 5th, 2010 by Andrey Belenko

I’ve had plans to create some kind of performance measurement app for iPhone/iPod/iPad for quite a bit time of already, and after reading recent reports that iOS 4 is very slow on iPhone 3G I thought that time had finally come.

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