Atola Blog

Atola TaskForce

Damaged drive imaging with TaskForce: A drive with a damaged head

A damaged hard drive, especially when it comes to evidence drives, requires a complex imaging approach to avoid the drive’s further deterioration and data loss. TaskForce system enhances your working with damaged evidence drives, minimizing the risk of losing data on the working part of the head stack.  Diagnostics and selective head imaging TaskForce’s built-in drive diagnostics module automatically checks all subsystems of the evidence drive. At the end of the diagnostics process, it provides a clear and detailed report about its electronics and motor, head stack, media surface, firmware and file system.  In the Heads section of the diagnostics report, TaskForce forensic imager provides detailed information about the state Read more…

By Olga Milishenko, ago
Conferences

Q&A during the Interpol Digital Forensics Expert Group 2020

On Tuesday, June 16 Atola’s Yulia Samoteykina spoke at Interpol’s annual Digital Forensic Expert Group. After the presentation about our imagers’ multi-pass imaging system and other damaged media functionality, we received a few follow-up questions. In this blog we would like to reiterate the answers to these questions: Can Atola imager acquire evidence from damaged SSDs? As is true with any type of media, the degree of damage will inform how we can help with data recovery from a specific device. SSD failures fall into three major categories: logical errors, hardware issues, firmware failure.  Atola imagers may be able to image data from an SSD with logical errors or hardware Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Business

Visit our virtual booth every Wednesday!

In the brave new world of physical distancing, when so many of the digital forensics events get canceled or postponed, we want to fill the void and keep the conversation going.  Atola is inviting you to our virtual booth. Starting May 20, we will be available for an hour-long live conversation every week on Wednesdays.  Just follow this link: meet.google.com/xho-cbni-pkf Wanna see our tools in action? No problem! And ask us: how to image more drives, faster why replacing a dozen imagers with one gets a whole lab to acquire evidence faster how to create an automated workflow that includes a hardware imager   how to extract and remove unknown Read more…

By Yulia Samoteykina, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Insight Forensic 4.16 released with E01 segmented images

Current global yet temporary circumstances have not impeded Atola dev team. We are releasing Atola Insight Forensic 4.16 today! The software update includes two new major features: E01 segmented images (E01, E02, etc) full support of SAS drives with non-standard logical sector sizes: 520, 524, 528 bytes and so on E01 segmented images We are grateful to our customers for valuable feedback. It is your feedback that got us focused on the development of E01 segment (chunk) functionality for Atola Insight Forensic. We know some of you have been waiting for the feature for quite some time. Finally, it has arrived! When selecting E01 file as a target, you will Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Business

How we create Atola products

Hi! I am Vitaliy Mokosiy, CTO in Atola Technology. I have been working here with great enjoyment and enthusiasm since 2008. Today I am taking this opportunity to shed light on the development process of Atola products, how it drives me as well as our whole dev team. We proudly presented Atola TaskForce to the forensic community almost two years ago. While the volume of digital evidence inevitably continues to grow, every day TaskForce imagers are out there helping save a great deal of time for our customers by imaging at 15 TB per hour of total performance. From a user’s perspective it is simple: you plug 12 SATA evidence Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola TaskForce

TaskForce imaging speed

Atola TaskForce is designed to be the fastest forensic imager. It allows imaging multiple drives simultaneously at the overall speed of 15 TB/hour. The individual imaging sessions run at the top native speeds of most drives. To test TaskForce imaging speed, we used various models of SSD, HDD & USB devices and compared the performance achieved with the read speed in sequential mode (sectors read and written to in linear order) at userbenchmark.com. NB Imaging speed is limited by the speed of the slowest of the devices, participating in the imaging session. Therefore, the slowest of the two speeds (either the read speed of the source or the write speed Read more…

By Olga Milishenko, ago
Atola TaskForce

TaskForce 2020.2 release with E01 segmentation

The key feature of this release is imaging to segmented E01 files (to E01, E02, E03 and so forth). For many forensic examiners, E01 segmentation makes sense for a more convenient way of storing data. Some back up the segmented images on BluRay drives, others want to avoid repeated attempts to copy large files to their server due to network failures.  E01 segmented images When selecting E01 file as a target, you will notice a new Segment Size dropdown. Click it to switch from a single E01 file to a segmented image. The segment size can be equal to one of the popular defaults or customized by the user. Segmented Read more…

By Yulia Samoteykina, ago
Atola TaskForce

Imaging to a file on an encrypted drive with TaskForce

With newest Atola TaskForce 2020.1 firmware, it is possible to image into files on an encrypted target drive using VeraCrypt for data encryption. Multiple target drives can be encrypted for the same or different sessions.After you have connected the source drive to a port in Source mode, take these steps: 1. Click on Image icon in the left-side taskbar 2. In Select source device panel, select the evidence drive 3. In Select target device menu, click on the tile in the File section 4. In Select image file window, click Add storage Click the link Create Image File on Target. 5. In Select device panel, choose the drive connected to Read more…

By Yulia Samoteykina, ago