When analyzing connected computers, one may be tempted to pull the plug and bring the PC to the lab for in-depth research. This strategy carries risks that may overweigh the benefits. In this article we’ll discuss what exactly you may be losing when pulling the plug.

There is a bit of confusion about our software designed to allow breaking into password-protected systems, files, documents, and encrypted containers. We have as many as three products (and five different tools) dealing with the matter: Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor (with an unnamed memory dumping tool), Elcomsoft System Recovery and Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, which also includes Elcomsoft Hash Extractor as part of the package. Let’s briefly go through all of them. Hopefully it will help you select the right product for your needs and save time in your investigation.

It’s been a long while since we made an update to one of our most technically advanced tools, Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor (EFDD). With this tool, one could extract data from an encrypted disk volume (FileVault 2, PGP, BitLocker or TrueCrypt) by utilizing the binary encryption key contained in the computer’s RAM. We could find and extract that key by analyzing the memory dump or hibernation files.

Investigators start seeing BitLocker encrypted volumes more and more often, yet computer users themselves may be genuinely unaware of the fact they’ve been encrypting their disk all along. How can you break into BitLocker encryption? Do you have to brute-force the password, or is there a quick hack to exploit?

Quite often our new customers ask us for advice about what they should start with in order to use the program effectively. In fact, there are various situations when the tool can come in handy by decrypting data securely protected with TrueCrypt, BitLocker (To-Go), or PGP and we’d need a super long video to describe all the cases. But we’d love to demonstrate one typical situation when disk is protected with TrueCrypt when entire system drive encryption option is on.

BitLocker, PGP and TrueCrypt set industry standard in the area of whole-disk and partition encryption. All three tools provide strong, reliable protection, and offer a perfect implementation of strong crypto.