Most people meet these four tools one product page at a time, which makes them look like four separate purchases for four separate problems. On a real desktop case they are closer to four stages of a single job. Each one hands its output to the next: Elcomsoft System Recovery and Elcomsoft Quick Triage pull the raw material off the machine, Forensic Disk Decryptor turns keys into mounted volumes, and Distributed Password Recovery grinds through whatever is left. In this article we will not go through the feature lists (the product pages do that job well enough); instead we will look at when to reach for each tool, and why the order in which you use them is not fixed but decided by the situation in front of you.

On May 12, 2026, a researcher operating under the handles Chaotic Eclipse and Nightmare-Eclipse dropped a working proof-of-concept on GitHub for a Windows zero-day called YellowKey. In short, it lets anyone with brief physical access to a BitLocker-protected Windows 11, Windows Server 2022, or Windows Server 2025 machine pop a command prompt with full read access to the encrypted volume. No password. No recovery key. No TPM sniffing rig. A USB stick and a key combination during reboot.

In the world of digital forensics, there are various ways to analyze computer systems. You might be familiar live system analysis or investigating forensic disk images, but there’s yet another method called cold system analysis. Unlike live analysis where experts deal with active user sessions, cold system analysis works differently. It’s like a middle ground between live analysis and examining saved images of a computer’s storage. But why and when would someone use cold analysis? What can you do with it, and how does it compare to the usual methods?

Access to encrypted information can be gained through various methods, including live system analysis (1 and 2), using bootable forensic tools, analysis of sleep/hibernation files, and exploiting TPM vulnerabilities, with password recovery being the last option on the list. Each method has different resource requirements and should be used in order of least resource-intensive to most time-consuming, with password recovery as the last resort. Familiarize yourself with the different encryption recovery strategies and learn about data formats with weak protection or known vulnerabilities.

Disk encryption is widely used desktop and laptop computers. Many non-ZFS Linux distributions rely on LUKS for data protection. LUKS is a classic implementation of disk encryption offering the choice of encryption algorithms, encryption modes and hash functions. LUKS2 further improves the already tough disk encryption. Learn how to deal with LUKS2 encryption in Windows and how to break in with distributed password attacks.

Modern versions of Windows have many different types of accounts. Local Windows accounts, Microsoft accounts, and domain accounts feature different types of protection. There is also Windows Hello with PIN codes, which are protected differently from everything else. How secure are these types of passwords, and how can you break them? Read along to find out!

Live system analysis is the easiest and often the only way to access encrypted data stored on BitLocker-protected disks. In this article we’ll discuss the available options for extracting BitLocker keys from authenticated sessions during live system analysis.

Encrypting a Windows system drive with BitLocker provides effective protection against unauthorized access, especially when paired with TPM. A hardware upgrade, firmware update or even a change in the computer’s UEFI BIOS may effectively lock you out, making your data inaccessible and the Windows system unbootable. How to prevent being locked out and how to restore access to the data if you are prompted to unlock the drive? Read along to find out.

BestCrypt, developed by the Finnish company Jetico, is a cross-platform commercial disk encryption tool directly competing with BitLocker, FileVault 2 and VeraCrypt. Volume encryption is available for Windows and macOS. Learn how to break BestCrypt full-disk encryption by recovering the original password!

Backups are the primary way to preserve data. On smartphones, backups are handled automatically by the OS. Windows lacks a convincing backup app; numerous third-party tools are available, some of which feature strong encryption. Computer backups may contain valuable evidence that can be useful during an investigation – if you can do something about the password.