iOS backup passwords are a frequent topic in our blog. We published numerous articles about these passwords, and we do realize it might be hard for a reader to get a clear picture from these scattered articles. This one publication is to rule them all. We’ll talk about what these passwords are, how they affect things, how to recover them, whether they can be reset, and whether you should bother. We’ll summarize years of research and provide specific recommendations for dealing with passwords.

If you are familiar with breaking passwords, you already know that different tools and file formats require a very different amount of efforts to break. Breaking a password protecting a RAR archive can take ten times as long as breaking a password to a ZIP archive with the same content, while breaking a Word document saved in Office 2016 can take ten times as long as breaking an Office 2010 document. With solutions for over 300 file formats and encryption algorithms, we still find iTunes backups amazing, and their passwords to be very different from the rest of the crop in some interesting ways. In this article we tried to gather everything we know about iTunes backup passwords to help you break (or reset) their passwords in the most efficient way.

If you follow industry news, you already know about the release of iOS 9. You may also know that iOS 9 is the toughest one to break, with no jailbreak available now or in foreseeable future. With no jailbreak and no physical acquisition available for newer devices, what methods can you still use to obtain evidence from passcode-locked devices? Our answer to this is Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 5.0 that adds over-the-air acquisition support for iOS 9.