Atola Blog

TaskForce 2025.4 update: iSCSI, HEX viewer and enhanced RAID options
Atola TaskForce

TaskForce 2025.4 update — iSCSI support, new RAID features, Hex Viewer

Whoa, look what we’ve got! The TaskForce 2025.4 firmware update is here, and it’s packed with useful new features! Whether you’re dealing with remote drives, analyzing sector data or rebuilding tricky RAIDs, this update has something for you. Here’s our top picks: iSCSI support for imaging remote drives New built-in HEX Viewer Smarter RAID autodetection with support for missing Synology NAS drives Let’s take a closer look at these and other new capabilities introduced in this update. Image remote drives via iSCSI TaskForce now supports imaging remote drives connected via iSCSI. This is especially useful when: A drive is soldered to the motherboard (as in many ultrabooks or embedded systems) Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Company news

2024. Year in Review

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 Read more…

By Yulia Samoteykina, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Insight Forensic 5.6 – Now with Btrfs and LVM support

Yay! A new software update for Insight Forensic with the Btrfs and LVM support is already available for download! Our engineers also made some tweaks and tune-ups, so Insight Forensic now images up to 60% faster to compressed E01 files. Let’s look at what’s under the hood in this release! Btrfs and LVM support Insight Forensic 5.6 can identify and manage the Btrfs file system, along with Logical Volume Manager (LVM) that are widely used on Linux-based operating systems. This includes diagnostics, imaging, file recovery, locate sectors, and all other modules. In Insight’s user interface, LVM’s volume groups and logical volumes are shown as containers with nested partitions: Faster imaging Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Atola TaskForce

TaskForce 2024.9 update – Templates for target files

It’s finally here! No more boring naming routines when creating target image files. With the newest TaskForce firmware update, use highly customizable and flexible templates instead. Set up a template once, and then create complex subfolder paths and file names with a couple of clicks, according to your internal naming conventions. Read on to see how this long-awaited feature works. Say, you’re imaging your evidence device to a file on a network server or storage drive, connected to the TaskForce. Before, it was time-consuming to enter a path and name for each file individually, not to mention repeating case details, such as case number, investigator name, or location. And if Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Creating templates for target file names in Atola TaskForce.
Which forensic file format to use for the maximum acquisition speed? AFF4 or E01?
Atola TaskForce 2

E01 vs AFF4: Which image format is faster?

How to spend less time clearing the backlog? And which forensic file format to use for the maximum acquisition speed? Those questions are not easy to answer. But OK, challenge accepted! Let’s measure and find out! If you’re into spoilers, jump to the “Final Results” part. If not, read on. And if you want to dive deeper into AFF4, the history behind its creation, its compression and hashing methods, as well as its advantages over other forensic file formats, check out this episode of our “Plug, Image, Repeat” newsletter! Setting things up How can we compare the productivity of two different file formats? Let’s design our experiment. We’ll need our Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Atola TaskForce

Image Synology NAS RAIDs with TaskForce 2024.6

At last! The newest version of TaskForce firmware introduces an improved RAID module with support for Synology NAS systems, Btrfs, and LVM (Logical Volume Manager), along with other top-shelf features such as the ability to group ports in Express mode and assign different imaging settings for each group. Also, we’ve added built-in user hints and an offline help system to ease your learning curve and provide instant advice. Let’s take a closer look at the main improvements and tweaks we’ve prepared for you in the new TaskForce update! Reassemble Synology NAS RAIDs automatically TaskForce forensic imagers now offer system-wide support for Synology Network Attached Storage, including SHR RAID management system, Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Reassemble Synology NAS RAIDs automatically in Atola TaskForce.
Atola Insight Forensic

Script to automatically create iSCSI targets

iSCSI network protocol allows remote access to physical or logical devices. In the DFIR domain, it is primarily used for imaging drives that are soldered into a motherboard, working servers that couldn’t be turned off, or devices for which you have legal warrant to access but not seize. In the enterprise segment, iSCSI also could help with replication of an image to multiple computers over a network. However, to expose a physical or logical drive via iSCSI on a network, you need to set up an iSCSI target correctly. And that is a tedious, multi-step task. To help you with that, we created a Python script named iscsi-targets. As its Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Insight Forensic 5.5 – Image 3 iSCSI drives in parallel

A new software update for Atola Insight Forensic is ready for download! Version 5.5 brings support for the iSCSI protocol and makes it possible to image drives that are soldered into a motherboard, working servers that couldn’t be turned off, or devices for which you have legal warrant to access but not seize. Use iSCSI for remote image acquisition Before, the remote imaging option in Insight Forensic was only available for specific models of MacBooks Pro and Air released in 2016-2017 by using a Thunderbolt extension module. Now, thanks to iSCSI support in Insight Forensic, you can add up to 3 remote network drives simultaneously and image them in parallel. Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Imaging an iSCSI device in Atola Insight Forensic 5.5
TaskForce 2024.1 update ‒ Verify segmented hashes
Atola TaskForce

TaskForce 2024.1 update ‒ Verify segmented hashes

You remember segmented hashes, right? They’re what you want to use to verify an image of a damaged drive: after multipass imaging of a damaged drive in TaskForce, these hashes are calculated only for the good areas of a drive. Segmented hashing also does its job when the classic linear hashing fails. By verifying all segmented hashes in a set, you can prove that the entire image has not changed over time. Even if the hash of one damaged segment becomes invalid, you still have all the other good segments with their valid hashes. But how do you verify segmented hashes? Previously, you could do it using our open source Read more…

By Sergiy Pasyuta, ago
Company news

2023. Year in Review

In 2023 Atola Technology celebrated 20 years since it was founded by Dmitry Postrigan and his partner at the time Fedir Nepyivoda. Our core team has just given an interview to Forensic Focus about some of our history, our process today, and Atola’s plans for the future: So, what else happened? In 2023 we launched our new flagship product, released 6 software updates, held a record number of meetings with customers, hired great new talents, and are already working on something new to share with you in 2024! Now, let’s take a closer look at what’s what. Atola TaskForce 2 No doubt, our most exciting project and accomplishment of 2023 Read more…

By Yulia Samoteykina, ago