The new year is just around the corner, and so it’s the right time to review our achievements in 2021. We’ve done plenty of researching, developing and updating, and posted a great deal of content in our blog. Let’s run through the most exciting developments of the year!

19 years ago, on July 16, 2001, the FBI arrested Dmitry Sklyarov, almost immediately after his speech at the DEF CON hacker conference, on a number of charges by Adobe. Dmitry was accused of many things, from software trafficking to conspiring with Elcomsoft and “third parties”, who put up the software for sale that could bypass technological protection on copyrighted material. Dmitry’s career at Elcomsoft began with a project on gaining access to protected Access databases. Soon, Dmitry got an idea about the security of PDF documents, and so he started working on it. From this idea the never-to-be-forgotten Advanced eBook Processor was born, because of which Dmitry was arrested in 2001 at DEF CON in Las Vegas, NV.

Staying on the bleeding edge of today’s technologies requires constant work. ElcomSoft lab is one of the busiest places in the company. Last year, we had dozens of devices passing through our lab. This publication opens the series of articles in which we’ll share insider’s information on what we do, what we are about to do, and how we do that. So let’s shed some light on what’s going on inside ElcomSoft lab.

Last week we have released our new product, EPPB, out of beta. We have fixed some bugs, polished GPU acceleration support, added support for Tableau TACC1441 hardware accelerator, making this program the world's first program capable of utilizing computing power of GPUs both from ATI and NVIDIA as well as dedicated hardware accelerators aimed primarily on computer forensics specialists. We have also included ability to run brute-force attacks and not only wordlist-based attacks. Latter were improved with ability to enable/disable individual types of password mutations and set customized level to any of them.

There is a lot of speculation about what has happened between Elcomsoft and PGP here on Infosecurity Europe 2009 in London, so I would like to share my own point of view which may or may not coincide with Elcomsoft’s.