Cracking Legacy ZIP Encryption: The Known-Plaintext Attack and Why It Still Sometimes Works
July 20th, 2026 by Oleg Afonin
When someone hands you a password-protected ZIP archive, one’s immediate thought is “I need to break the password”. For most modern archives, that is exactly the case, and the password is the whole game. But there is a family of ZIP archives where the password does not matter at all. It can be four characters or forty, random or memorable; if the archive uses the legacy ZIP encryption, the whole thing can be unlocked in minutes without ever guessing the password. This is one of the oldest tricks in our line of work, and it is worth telling the story properly, because it is equal parts computer history and practical forensics.
Yahoo!, Dropbox and Battle.net Hacked: Stopping the Chain Reaction
February 14th, 2013 by Vladimir Katalov
Major security breaches occur in quick succession one after another. Is it a chain reaction? How do we stop it?
Norwegian Teenagers Hacking iCloud Accounts
February 7th, 2013 by Olga Koksharova
A few days ago, we received the following communication from an obsessed password researcher and our long-standing friend (quoted with his permission):
ElcomSoft Decrypts BitLocker, PGP and TrueCrypt Containers
December 20th, 2012 by Vladimir Katalov
BitLocker, PGP and TrueCrypt set industry standard in the area of whole-disk and partition encryption. All three tools provide strong, reliable protection, and offer a perfect implementation of strong crypto.
