Decrypt WhatsApp Backups with Elcomsoft eXplorer for WhatsApp
by
Olga Koksharova
WhatsApp is world’s most popular instant messaging tool, period. By the end of 2015, WhatsApp was enjoying a healthy market share of 44 per cent among the users of instant messaging apps (with the exception of China, where WhatsApp is not nearly as popular as Chinese-made WeChat). Even Facebook Messenger, which comes at close second, only managed to captured 35 per cent of the market.
What made WhatsApp so overwhelmingly popular? WhatsApp is easy to register and easy to use. All you need to register is a mobile phone number. Your contacts will find you by using your phone number – not a nickname and not your real name. This idea was fresh at the time when WhatsApp was initially released, and it worked great with the audience.
WhatsApp makes client apps for all major mobile platforms. The instant messaging app supports Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 (although support for these platforms is ending early next year), as well as Microsoft Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile.
With nearly half users installing WhatsApp, this instant messaging tool becomes both a tool of choice and a major target for criminals, spammers and scammers.
WhatsApp is one of the most secure instant messaging tools on the market. The tool employs end-to-end communication with secure on-the-fly encryption. Messages are exchanged directly between users; they never end up in a “made for intelligence” database on some third-party server. As a result, nobody, not even law enforcement, can gain access to WhatsApp chats – unless they seize and analyze the actual device that was used to send and receive messages.
ElcomSoft offers an alternative to physical acquisition. Meet Elcomsoft eXplorer for WhatsApp elcomsoft.com/exwa.html , a tool that can extract and decrypt WhatsApp data. The built-in viewer displays the content of data backups produced by WhatsApp messenger and saved either locally or in the cloud.
Supporting the iOS version of WhatsApp, Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp can extract WhatsApp data from pretty much every source supported by Apple iOS. The tool can extract WhatsApp data from iTunes backups or pull the data from iCloud backups produced by iOS devices.
WhatsApp can be also configured to maintain backups in iCloud Drive. These backups are created and managed by WhatsApp itself, and are separate from iOS system backups. Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp is the only tool on the market that can download and decrypt WhatsApp standalone backups stored in iCloud Drive.
Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp comes with a decent built-in viewer allowing accessing WhatsApp chat history, text messages and pictures extracted from a WhatsApp backup. The viewer supports browsing, searching and filtering, making navigation across WhatsApp data a blast.
Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp comes with a downloadable evaluation version. Download Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp at elcomsoft.com/exwa.html
Olga Koksharova is involved in security research related to mobile forensics. During the last years, Olga has been busy researching security trends in the world of mobile forensic. Olga is an expert in cryptography and IT security.
Article Source:
eArticlesOnline.com
}