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.

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 🙂

The story about PGP becomes really funny.

Let’s play a game! Rules are simple – just try to catch as much apples as you can into your police cap. Good catchers will get 25% discount for the new version of Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker. Your challenge is just 100 apples, so let’s play! 🙂

When it comes to adding new features to our products we try to focus on our customers’ needs and it is my pleasure today to announce a preview (or beta) version of our Phone Password Breaker tool with new features requested (or inspired) by our valued customers users 🙂

We’ve analyzed 17 popular password management apps available for Apple iOS and BlackBerry platforms, including free and commercially available tools, and discovered that no single password keeper app provides a claimed level of protection. None of the password keepers except one are utilizing iOS or BlackBerry existing security model, relying on their own implementation of data encryption. ElcomSoft research shows that those implementations fail to provide an adequate level of protection, allowing an attacker to recover encrypted information in less than a day if user-selectable Master Password is 10 to 14 digits long.

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.

According to the preliminary results of our latest questionnaire (ElcomSoft Customer Reference program Questionnaire) the majority of people forget their passwords when returned from holidays, thus being blocked out from the precious information they have on the PC.
I bet that lots of people found themselves or those around in a similar situation at least once. Let me share my personal experience with you. One of my friends, having returned from the vacation in a tropical paradise, was pleased to see a new computer at her desk (while she was away the company renewed some of the machines) and at the same time very much discouraged and upset to find out that many of her passwords remained in her old pc and she didn't bother herself to save them anywhere else. So the access to the mail account from her new modern PC was forbidden, as well as access to several password-protected websites (from social networks to online banking).  Nothing to be happy with, isn’t it?!! But such a story no longer has a sad ending due to the release of Elcom’s new recovery tool, namely ElcomSoft Internet Password Breaker. In the above described situation EINPB revealed necessary passwords stored in the old computer, thus letting a person replace the password-protected data from one machine to another.  One more important remark in this respect is that my friend didn’t have to seek help of the “user-unfriendly sysadmin” 🙂

It’s been two weeks since Steve Jobs has announced release of new iPhone 4 and iOS 4 operating system during his keynote on WWDC’2010. New iPhone will begin shipping on Thursday, 24th of June, and new iOS will become available for download today, just few hours are left.