What can possibly go wrong with that iPhone? I’ll have a look (oh, it’s locked!), then switch it off, eject the SIM card and pass it on to the expert. Well, you’ve just made three of the five most common mistakes making subsequent unlock and extraction attempts significantly more difficult. Learn about the most common mistakes and their consequences.

Today’s smartphones collect overwhelming amounts of data about the user’s daily activities. Smartphones track users’ location and record the number of steps they walked, save pictures and videos they take and every message they send or receive. Users trust smartphones with their passwords and login credentials to social networks, e-commerce and other Web sites. It is hard to imagine one’s daily life without calendars and reminders, notes and browser favorites and many other bits and pieces of information we entrust our smartphones. All of those bits and pieces, and much more, are collected from the iPhone and stored in the cloud. While Apple claims secure encryption for all of the cloud data, the company readily provides some information to the law enforcement when presented with a legal request – but refuses to give away some of the most important bits of data. In this article we’ll cover the types of data that Apple does and does not deliver when served with a government request or while processing the user’s privacy request.

What is DFU, and how is it different from the recovery mode? How do you switch the device to recovery, DFU or SOS mode, what can you do while in these modes and what do they mean in the context of digital forensics? Can you use DFU to jailbreak the device and perform the extraction if you don’t know the passcode? Read along to find out.

TerraMaster is a relatively new company specializing in network attached storage and direct attached storage solutions. The majority of TerraMaster NAS solutions are ARM64 and Intel-based boxes aimed at the home and SOHO users. TerraMaster’s OS (TOS) is based on Linux. At this time, TOS 4.1 is the current version of the OS.

Thecus has been manufacturing NAS devices for more than 15 years. The company develops an in-house Linux-based NAS OS, the ThecusOS. At this time, the most current version of the OS is ThecusOS 7. Thecus advertises secure data encryption in most of its NAS devices. The company’s volume-based encryption tool allows users to fully encrypt their entire RAID volume, defending essential data in instances of theft of the physical device. We found Thecus’ implementation of encryption somewhat unique. In this research, we’ll verify the manufacturer’s claims and check just how secure is Thecus’ implementation of 256-bit AES encryption.

We have recently updated Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit, adding the ability to acquire the file system from a wide range of iOS devices. The supported devices include models ranging from the iPhone 5s through the iPhone X regardless of the iOS version; more on that in iOS Device Acquisition with checkra1n Jailbreak. In today’s update (for both Windows and macOS platforms as usual), we’ve added the ability to extract select keychain records in the BFU (Before First Unlock) mode. We have a few other changes and some tips on extracting locked and disabled devices.

The past two years introduced a number of challenges forensic experts have never faced before. In 2018, Apple made it more difficult for the police to safely transport a seized iPhone to the lab by locking the USB port with USB restricted mode, making data preservation a challenge. The release of the A12 platform, also in 2018, made it difficult to unlock iOS devices protected with an unknown password, while this year’s release of iOS 13 rendered unlock boxes useless on iPhones based on the two most recent platforms.

Are you excited about the new checkm8 exploit? If you haven’t heard of this major development in the world of iOS jailbreaks, I would recommend to read the Technical analysis of the checkm8 exploit aricle, as well as Developer of Checkm8 explains why iDevice jailbreak exploit is a game changer. The good news is that a jailbreak based on this exploit is already available, look at the checkra1n web site.

Home users and small offices are served by two major manufacturers of network attached storage devices (NAS): QNAP and Synology, with Western Digital being a distant third. All Qnap and Synology network attached storage models are advertised with support for hardware-accelerated AES encryption. Encrypted NAS devices can be a real roadblock on the way of forensic investigations. In this article, we’ll review the common encryption scenarios used in home and small office models of network attached storage devices made by Synology. (more…)

The release of macOS Catalina brought the usual bunch of security updates. One of those new security features directly affects how you install Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit on Macs running the new OS. In this guide we’ll provide step by step instructions on installing and running iOS Forensic Toolkit on computers running macOS 10.15 Catalina. Note: on macOS Catalina, you must use iOS Forensic Toolkit 5.11 or newer (older versions may also work but not recommended).