Software updates remain a sore point for the 86 per cent of consumers who are using Android-based smartphones. Both Apple and Microsoft have significantly different update policies, mostly allowing the companies to deliver updates directly to their customers. There is much more to these updates than just the Android (or Windows) version. With numerous versions, subversions and carrier modified versions of the phone’s software, experts may struggle when attempting physical extraction. Let us have a look at the differences between the three mobile operating systems, their update policies and the challenges they present to the forensic examiner.

We’ve just updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to version 6.60, adding remote acquisition support for Microsoft Windows 10 phones and desktops. The new build can pull search and Web browsing history, call logs, and location history directly from the user’s Microsoft Account. In this article we’ll have a look at what exactly is available and can be extracted and where this information is stored. We will also list the steps required to extract and view the data.

In other blog post, we discussed the updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker that allows extracting search and browsing history, location data and call logs from users’ Microsoft Accounts. Now let’s talk about the origins of this data and how to enable its collection on different devices – even if they don’t run Microsoft Windows.