| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Headquarters | Moscow, Russia |
| Website | www.ElcomSoft.com |
ElcomSoft is a Russian computer software company specializing in computer security and data recovery applications. Popular products include their eBook processing and password recovery software supporting many of Microsoft's products. ElcomSoft is also a co-founder of the Independent Software Developers Forum (ISDEF).
ElcomSoft has filed several patents in the USA. One of them is for the company's proprietary technology Thunder Tables.
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On July 16, 2001, Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian citizen employed by ElcomSoft who was at the time visiting the United States for DEF CON, was arrested and jailed for allegedly violating the United States DMCA law by writing ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor software. A landmark court case ensued, setting precedents and attracting much public attention and protest. On December 17, 2002, ElcomSoft was found not guilty of all four charges under the DMCA. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, had this to say to CNET:[1]
Looking back with 20/20, I wish that we could have had better communication with ElcomSoft, Dmitry Sklyarov and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) before the whole thing went public. I'm sorry that we weren't able to do that, because I think we could have resolved a lot of the issues.
On November 30, 2010, Elcomsoft announced that the encryption system used by Canon cameras to ensure that pictures and EXIF metadata have not been altered was flawed and cannot be fixed.[2][3] On that same day, Dmitry Sklyarov gave a presentation at at the Confidence 2.0 conference in Prague demonstrating the flaws.[4] Among others, he showed an image of an astronaut planting a flag of the Soviet Union on the moon; all the images pass Canon's authenticity verification.[5]