New tools on the horizon

Been busy again but here's a brief update..

Recently I read about the upcoming release of Accessdata FTK 3.0. Yikes! 3.0 so soon? If you ask me it looks like Accessdata wants to get away from the 2.0 brand name and on to something that may have appeal to most people.

Why am I excited by 3.0? It's really quite simple. 3.0 allows you to have 4 workers for the same price as the one worker that was available in 2.x. Hopefully the processing speed is infintely faster, assuming they did it right. With 2TB drives being available I don't really see another way for the common examiner to keep up, especially when you have to do full indexes, hashing, carving and so on. Here's to hoping that 3.0 lives up to the marketing slicks...and for Accessdata's sake lets hope it does.

What else is coming? The Image Masster Solo-4. Now this device looks appealing to me as it meets my current requirement set for a hardware imaging device. It supports encryption of the image on the fly using ICS drive cypher. It can send the image over the network through a 1 GB interface. It runs a windows xp OS? That has me a little worried (imagine the imaging device getting compromised by a network worm if used in a hostile network environment) but to be honest but I don't know enough about it just yet. The device will be around $2500 according to the rep I spoke to.

HBGary expanded Responder Pro to include some very interesting tools like REcon, and C# scripting capabilities. FastDump Pro also got a bit of a facelift to include Process Probing via the -probe switch. Basically you take a process and force all of its paged out memory back in to physical memory for analysis. More on these developments soon.