Welcome to 2025! As we look ahead to new opportunities and continue to innovate, let’s take a moment to reflect on the milestones of 2024.
We’ve made significant strides in enhancing both the TaskForce and Insight Forensic platforms with five software updates over the year. We also achieved a record number of conference attendances and presentations, kept our team strong, and even welcomed a new member. As we step into 2025, we’re excited to share our upcoming products and innovations! But first, let’s take a look back at the key moments of 2024.
Atola TaskForce 1 & 2 software updates
Since the launch of TaskForce 2, it has gained a loyal user base, keeping our assembly engineers busy. We’ve continued to upgrade both TaskForce and TaskForce 2, with the Synology NAS RAID feature being one of our top achievements. This feature brings seamless support for the very popular Synology RAIDs of both SHR/SHR2 types, instantly detecting RAID configurations and showing partition and file structures.
The 2024 firmware releases 2024.1 and 2024.6 introduced several key features:
- System-wide Btrfs support.
- System-wide LVM (Logical Volume Manager) support
- Improved capability to resume imaging in case of power or network connection loss.
- Expanded range of Web API commands for further automation.
- BitLocker volume detection with FVE Metadata blocks.
- Verify segmented hashes
- New Ethernet bonding mode for ETH1 and ETH2 ports.
- New Hints subsystem shows practical hints to help optimize your work: a hint appears once as a notification, and later can be found in the hint list in the top bar.
- Express Mode Imaging for port groups: the ability to instantly image from selected ports to one folder with specific settings and from other specified ports to another folder with other settings.
The latest 2024.9 release brought the a cool new feature:
Target file templates in physical and logical imaging. Create reusable templates that help the following:
- dynamically create destination folders based on date or other info
- filename generation according to your naming convention
- enter the same file/case details for many images
Insight Forensic software updates
The April’s 5.5 release brought many novelties.
- System-wide support for iSCSI devices. 3 parallel imaging sessions for both DiskSense 2 and DiskSense 1 units.
- NVMe drives, for DiskSense 2 unit only: improvements of diagnostics, new status bar and warnings of critical situations
- Multi-launch menu. Support of quick launch of all operations for image files.
- BitLocker analysis now includes all FVE Metadata Blocks.
- Better detection of vendor specific SMART attributes of different SSD models
The 5.6 release followed with many new features and bugfixes including:
- System-wide Btrfs support.
- System-wide LVM (Logical Volume Manager) support.
- Imaging of high-entropy (encrypted/compressed) data to E01 compressed file uses a new rapid adaptive method resulting in speed optimization
iSCSI source device support:
- Ability to connect to iSCSI device via DNS.
- New Details button added to show IQN, IP/DNS, device name and serial number.
New product is underway!
2024 saw our hardware team working on two major projects. One of these promises to bring a groundbreaking new product soon, and we can’t wait to share it with you!
Hardware highlights
What a busy year for our hardware department! TaskForce 2 was launched in July 2023 and the assembly engineers had their hands full ever since. Here is to your to your incredible effort assembling and testing every single unit!
Team growth
Our team remained intact in 2024, with no one leaving the company. One team member even transitioned from part-time to full-time to support our growing assembly efforts.
In December, we welcomed Oleg to our software team, and after a month of intensive onboarding, he’s already contributing to our programming tasks. We’re thrilled to have you on board, Oleg!
We celebrated our team
We are lucky to work alongside some very cool characters and seriously talented individuals! Our social media posts about our colleagues have revealed a lot of fascinating trivia about them. Who knew that Nazar apprenticed as a leather craftsman and acted in a short film about the Witcher, or that Anna is an expert in automotive and mining fields, while Denys has background in computational chemistry! We have an eclectic mix of individuals that promotes a fun and creative team dynamic.
Newsletter
Our content on LinkedIn has gained a lot of traction. The monthly newsletters have been especially popular among our followers. Enjoy the good read and subscribe to our regular publications!
Article on SATA SSD performance
We’ve shared some great insights into the world of drives in 2024, and our article on SATA SSD performance—produced by our very own Sergiy Pasyuta—was especially popular. Sergiy tested various SSDs and experimented with different setups to get the best assessment, providing valuable insights into their performance in our lab.
Record conferences, presentations and meetings with customers
2024 was a record year for Atola, with over three dozen conferences, expos, and forensic science workshops in North America and Europe. It was our busiest conference season ever! Although we didn’t attend events in Latin America, Africa, or Australia (the usual events we attend in these regions were not held in 2024), we’re planning to visit these regions in 2025.
You can always check our updated Atola at events page to stay in the loop and help plan an in-person meeting with us.
In addition to conferences, we held many one-on-one customer meetings, including training, interviews, demos, and support sessions. We’re grateful for the trust and feedback from our customers, which helps us continuously improve our products.
Partner appreciation
A big thank you to our partners and resellers around the world for your contributions to our success in 2024. You’ve been key to our growth, and we truly value our collaboration with you.
Team time
Amid the challenges of 2024, we made sure to take time for team bonding and celebrating each other’s achievements. Whether working, learning, volunteering, or enjoying time together, we reinforced the compassionate and supportive culture that makes Atola such a great place to work.
Relief for Ukraine
The continued Russian war in Ukraine has caused more devastation in 2024. It has a huge impact on all Ukrainians but especially the people on the frontline, refugees and vulnerable groups. Our teammates continued to donate to initiatives in both humanitarian and defense fields. In one such effort, the Your Support foundation was facilitating people to become a personal Santa for the children of the fallen Ukrainian soldiers. It was a heartwarming way to close out 2024 for Atola.
We encourage you to be a part of the effort to help Ukraine achieve peace and rebuild. There are dozens of great organizations out there. Here are just a few of them:
Happy 2025!
We’re excited for all that’s to come in 2025, and we can’t wait to continue working with all of you.
Yulia believes that with a product that is exceptionally good at solving tasks of forensic experts, marketing is about explaining its capabilities to the users. Yulia regularly represents Atola at DFIR events, holds free workshops and webinars about Atola imagers functionality and advocates on the users' behalf to ensure that Atola keeps on adding value and raising the bar for the industry.
- Top digital forensic conferences in 2025 - January 7, 2025
- 2024. Year in Review - January 1, 2025
- 2023. Year in Review - December 31, 2023
Yulia Samoteykina
Director of Marketing Yulia believes that with a product that is exceptionally good at solving tasks of forensic experts, marketing is about explaining its capabilities to the users. Yulia regularly represents Atola at DFIR events, holds free workshops and webinars about Atola imagers functionality and advocates on the users' behalf to ensure that Atola keeps on adding value and raising the bar for the industry.
