How many Android handsets are encrypted, and how much protection does Android encryption actually provide? With Android Nougat accounting for roughly 7% of the market, the chance of not being adequately protected is still high for an average Android user.

As you may already know, we’ve added Android support to our WhatsApp acquisition tool, Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp. While the updated tool can now extract WhatsApp communication histories directly from Android smartphones with or without root access, how do you actually use it, and how does it work? In this blog post we’ll be looking into the technical detail and learn how to use the tool.

Back in 2013, Apple has added a fingerprint reader to its then new iPhone 5s. Around that time, OEMs manufacturing Android devices have also started equipping their devices with fingerprint sensors. It turned out that Apple and Android OEMs came to severely different results. In this article, we’ll have a look at fingerprint reader implementations in pre-Marshmallow Android devices and see why they were a terrible idea. (more…)

Today we are super excited: our first book on mobile forensics just got published! The book is called “Mobile Forensics – Advanced Investigative Strategies”, and is about everything you need to successfully acquire evidence from the widest range of mobile devices. Unlike most other books on this subject, we don’t just throw file names or hex dumps at your face. Instead, we discuss the issues of seizing mobile devices and preserving digital evidence before it reaches the lab; talk about acquisition options available in every case, and help you choose the correct acquisition path to extract evidence with least time and minimal risk.

Fingerprint Unlock Security: Google Android and Microsoft Hello

Biometric approach to unlocking portable electronics has been on the rise since late 2013 when Apple released iPhone 5S. Ever since, manufacturers started adding fingerprint scanners to their devices. In the world of Android, this was frequently done without paying much (if any) attention to actual security. So how do these systems compare?

While here at ElcomSoft we offer a limited range of tools for acquiring Android devices that’s pretty much limited to over-the-air acquisition, we are still often approached with questions when one should use cloud extraction, and when other acquisition methods should be used. In this article, we decided to sum up our experience in acquiring the various Android devices, explaining why we decided to go for a cloud acquisition tool instead of implementing the many physical and logical extraction methods. This article is a general summary of available acquisition methods for the various makes, models, chipsets and OS versions of Android smartphones. The article is not intended to be a technical guide; instead, it’s supposed to give you a heads-up on approaching Android acquisition.