ElcomSoft
Russian software company
ElcomSoft is a privately owned software company headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Since its establishment in 1990, the company has been working on computer security programs, with the main focus on password and system recovery software.
History
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 charged for violating the United States DMCA law by writing ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor software. He was later released on bail and allowed to return to Russia, and the charges against him were dropped. The charges against ElcomSoft were not, and a court case ensued, attracting much public attention and protest. On December 17, 2002, ElcomSoft was found not guilty of all four charges under the DMCA.
Thunder Tables is the company's own technology developed to ensure guaranteed recovery of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents protected with 40-bit encryption. The technology first appeared in 2007 and employs the time–memory tradeoff method to build pre-computed hash tables, which open the corresponding files in a matter of seconds instead of days. These tables take around four gigabytes. So far, the technology is used in two password recovery programs: Advanced Office Password Breaker and Advanced PDF Password Recovery.
In 2009 ElcomSoft released a tool that takes WPA/WPA2 Hash Codes and uses brute-force methods to guess the password associated with a wireless network.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “ElcomSoft” is russian software company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through ElcomSoft, Russian and software, not as a finished interpretation.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5353861. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2001, 2002 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “ElcomSoft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.