The proliferation of always connected, increasingly smart devices had led to a dramatic increase in the amount of highly sensitive information stored in manufacturers’ cloud accounts. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the three major cloud providers who also develop their own hardware and OS ecosystems. In this report, we’ll see how these companies protect their users’ highly sensitive information compared to each other.

Cloud acquisition is one of the most common ways to obtain valuable evidence. When it comes to Google, the Google Account analysis may return significantly more data compared to the extraction of a physical Android device. However, there is one feature that is often overlooked: the ability to extract data stored in the user’s Google Account without the login and password. Let’s talk about Google authentication tokens and what they bring for the mobile forensics.

For us, this year has been extremely replete with all sorts of developments in desktop, mobile and cloud forensics. We are proud with our achievements and want to share with you. Let’s have a quick look at what we’ve achieved in the year 2019.

In Apple’s land, losing your Apple Account password is not a big deal. If you’d lost your password, there could be a number of options to reinstate access to your account. If your account is not using Two-Factor Authentication, you could answer security questions to quickly reset your password, or use iForgot to reinstate access to your account. If you switched on Two-Factor Authentication to protect your Apple Account, you (or anyone else who knows your device passcode and has physical access to one of your Apple devices) can easily change the password; literally in a matter of seconds.

After testing waters for more than a year, Google has finally pulled the plug and began blocking access to Google Play services on uncertified devices. Why Google took this step, who is affected, and what it means for the end users? Let’s try to find out.

With over 1.3 billion monthly users, WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging tool worldwide, and Android is the most popular mobile operating system by far. This makes WhatsApp acquisition from Android devices essential for the law enforcement. Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp 2.30 can now download and decrypt Android user’s encrypted WhatsApp communication histories stored in Google Drive. If you have access to the user’s trusted phone number or their physical SIM card (to receive a verification code from WhatsApp), you can now use Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp to download, decrypt and display WhatsApp communication histories backed up into the user’s Google Account. Surprisingly, a cloud backup may, in certain cases, contain even more information than stored on the device itself. This particularly applies to attachments (photos and videos) sent and received by WhatsApp users and then deleted from the device.

In each major Android update, Google improves security on the one hand, and moves a few more things to the cloud on the other. The recently finalized and finally released Android 8.0 Oreo adds one important thing to all devices running the newest build of Google’s OS: the ability to back up SMS text messages into the user’s Google Account.

As you may know, we have recently updated Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, bumping the version number from 1.30 to 1.31. A very minor update? A bunch of unnamed bug fixes and performance improvements? Not really. Under the hood, the new release has major changes that will greatly affect usage experience. What exactly has changed and why, and what are the forensic implications of these changes? Bear with us to find out.

Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer 1.30 can now pull SMS (text) messages straight off the cloud, and offers enhanced location processing with support for Routes and Places. In this article, we’ll have a close look at the new features and get detailed instructions on how to use them. The first article will discuss the text messages, while enhanced location data will be covered in the one that follows.

Even before we released Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, you’ve been able to download users’ location data from Google. What you would get then was a JSON file containing timestamped geolocation coordinates. While this is an industry-standard open data format, it provides little insight on which places the user actually visits. A full JSON journal filled with location data hardly provides anything more than timestamped geographic coordinates. Even if you pin those coordinates to a map, you’ll still have to scrutinize the history to find out which place the user has actually gone to.