Atola Technology has released a new software update for Atola Insight Forensic, a fast forensic imaging system with the capacity to run 3 simultaneous imaging sessions and work with damaged media.
Version 5.3 can now perform cryptocurrency artifact search and securely wipe NVMe drives with Sanitize and Format NVM methods. It has also received a substantial performance boost and widened its multitasking capabilities.
“With this update we introduce highly expected cryptocurrency artifact search in our Artifact Finder module, which now detects Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses and BIP39 mnemonic phrases,” said Vitaliy Mokosiy, CTO at Atola Technology. “We’ve also added two secure wiping methods for NVMe drives and extended our Multi-launch functionality to support simultaneous launch on up to 7 drives of four more commands, including drive diagnostics and hash calculation. On top of that, we’ve tuned up our algorithms to increase the hashing speed by up to 110 percent. All these improvements will save a great deal of time for forensic experts using our product.”
Search cryptocurrency artifacts with Artifact Finder
Insight Forensic provides much more than simple imaging software. It supports copying of damaged drives and handles 3 parallel imaging sessions at high speeds with ease. To speed up the evidence search and optimize acquisition process, it performs artifact detection on a sector level during imaging.
In addition to emails, IP and MAC addresses, GPS and URLs, credit card and phone numbers, keywords and regular expressions, Insight Forensic 5.3 can now do a live search of cryptocurrency artifacts:
- BIP39 mnemonic phrases,
- Bitcoin wallet addresses,
- Ethereum wallet addresses.
Enhanced Artifact finder provides preliminary overview of evidence on a drive as you image it.
Securely wipe NVMe drives with Sanitize and Format NVM
For secure wiping of NVMe M.2 drives with Fill or Erase command, Atola team has added support for two new methods based on NVMe 1.4 specification: Format NVM and Sanitize.
Both Format NVM and Sanitize methods utilize SSD controller’s internal wiping algorithms specified in NVM Express standard.
For the Format NVMe method two erase modes are supported: Data Erase and Cryptographic Erase.
The Sanitize method allows you to select different options for altering user data in all locations on the drive in which user data may be stored:
- Block Erase uses a low-level block erase method specific to the media.
- Crypto Erase changes the media encryption keys.
- Overwrite writes a fixed data pattern or related patterns.
Launch more tasks simultaneously with Multi-launch
The Multi-launch functionality for simultaneous wiping of up to 7 devices was introduced in Insight Forensic version 5.2.
To run more similar tasks on all connected devices at once, Insight 5.3 adds four more commands to the Multi-launch menu:
- Artifact Finder for artifacts search.
- Automatic Checkup for drive diagnostics.
- Calculate hash.
- Locate sectors for finding files, which correspond to certain sets of sector ranges.
To boost multitasking productivity even more, we’ve added the Detect all devices option to the Port menu. With this command, a user can power up and identify all attached drives in one go.
Calculate hash up to 110% faster
We’ve rebuilt our algorithms to boost productivity and calculate hashes even faster. As a result, hash calculation performance has increased by up to 110% depending on the hash type.
Here’s the speed comparison in MB/s of hash calculation on NVMe drives:
About Atola Insight Forensic system
Atola Insight Forensic is a fast forensic imager with the capacity to perform 3 simultaneous imaging sessions on a wide range of media. It also offers complex yet highly automated data recovery functions on failing storage devices and provides utilities for accessing hard drives at the lowest level. The system includes DiskSense 2 hardware forensic unit, hardware extension modules, and Insight Forensic software to operate them.
About Atola Technology
Atola Technology is an innovative company based in Vancouver, Canada, specializing in creating forensic imaging hardware tools for the global forensic market.
Atola’s engineers, including its founder and CEO Dmitry Postrigan, have strong expertise in storage media and data recovery, and focus on creating highly efficient and user-friendly forensic imagers.
