Bypassing Stolen Device Protection: Alternative Ways of Installing the Extraction Agent

June 24th, 2026 by Oleg Afonin

Stated plainly: iOS Forensic Toolkit can now get past Stolen Device Protection. There is a catch, and it belongs up front: this is not a magic unlock, and anyone selling it as one is selling something. What we have built is a way to install the extraction agent without ever pairing the iPhone to the workstation over a USB port. Because the most disruptive thing SDP does to a forensic workflow is place Face ID or Touch ID in front of that pairing step, bypassing the pairing step bypasses the gate. You still need the device passcode, a paid Apple Developer account, and a device you are authorized to examine. With those in hand, SDP is no longer the wall it was a month ago.

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Breaking Into iCloud: No Password Required

June 17th, 2014 by Vladimir Katalov

With little news on physical acquisition of the newer iPhones, we made every effort to explore the alternatives. One of the alternatives to physical acquisition is over-the-air acquisition from Apple iCloud, allowing investigators accessing cloud backups stored in the cloud. While this is old news (we learned to download data from iCloud more than two years ago), this time we have something completely different: access to iCloud backups without a password! The latest release of Phone Password Breaker is all about password-free acquisition of iCloud backups.

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Phone Password Breaker with all-new UI, BlackBerry 10 support, and downloading Windows Phone 8 data from the cloud

May 8th, 2014 by Vladimir Katalov

This time, we are updating our bread-and-butter mobile forensic tool, Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker, to version 3.0 (beta). This new version has many things that are new or have changed. Let’s see what’s new, and why.

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About iTunes and iCloud Backups But Were Afraid to Ask

March 31st, 2014 by Vladimir Katalov

Do you think you know everything about creating and using backups of Apple iOS devices? Probably not. Our colleague and friend Vladimir Bezmaly (MVP Consumer security, Microsoft Security Trusted Advisor) shares some thoughts, tips and tricks on iTunes and iCloud backups.

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Our Autumn Events Digest

November 6th, 2013 by Olga Koksharova

This fall has been quite rich in IT security events for ElcomSoft. We managed to visit a number of conferences and trade shows in order to, as we say in Russia, see the others and be seen 🙂

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Forensic Day in Karlsruhe

September 27th, 2013 by Oleg Afonin

We’ve just returned from Karlsruhe, Germany from an event named FTDay. Hosted by mh-Service, a long-time ElcomSoft partner in Germany, this was a small but quality event. The first day was packed with sessions. The second day was dedicated to practical workshops.

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Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker Enhances iCloud Forensics and Speeds Up Investigations

August 22nd, 2013 by Vladimir Katalov

It’s been a while since we updated Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker, dedicating our efforts to physical acquisition of iOS devices instead. Well, now when the new iOS Forensic Toolkit is out, it is time to update our classic phone recovery tool.

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The New Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit

July 17th, 2013 by Vladimir Katalov

Soon after releasing the updated version of iOS Forensic Toolkit we started receiving questions about the new product. Did we really break iPhone 5? Does it truly work? Are there limitations, and what can you do about them? We decided to assemble all these questions into a small FAQ. If you’d rather read the full, more technical version of this FAQ, visit the following page instead: Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit FAQ. Those with non-technical background please read along.

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