Exterro enhances digital forensic investigation portfolio for law enforcement teams

Exterro announced upcoming enhancements across its entire digital forensic investigation portfolio. The FTK family of products will offer support for law enforcement and enterprise investigators for any type of forensic investigation, whether they’re investigating a breach or investigating a suspect.

In high-pressure forensic investigations, skyrocketing data volumes and devastating cyber-attacks have driven demand for forensic tools that significantly reduce collection, processing, and review timeframes to get key case-evidence in front of investigators much faster. Additionally, the growth of remote working has increased the need for secure, cloud-data source collection, as well as remote collection from any endpoint, anywhere, while ensuring data integrity and protecting chain of custody.

Meeting these needs and more, the Exterro FTK Product Portfolio – including the flagship FTK Lab, FTK Enterprise, and newly released FTK Central offerings – will bring substantially enhanced stability, automation, and reliability across the board, together with a faster collection and processing engine.

Among multiple new features, it adds offline language translation support for cross-border investigations and multilingual data sets, introduces Explicit Image Detection and AI-powered Video Recognition capabilities for law enforcement teams, and, in a competitive breakthrough, will be first to market with full support for Mac artifacts, applications, and data types.

“FTK is the trusted gold standard in digital forensics because it finds the evidence other tools can’t, helps investigators work better and faster, and gets it right every time,” said Bobby Balachandran, CEO and Founder of Exterro. “Our upgraded FTK Product Portfolio helps make the world a safer place by supporting and protecting those who protect the most vulnerable. We highlight this commitment in many ways, from helping investigators to work more successfully to safeguarding them from mental trauma.”

The new release will update existing capabilities supporting CAID and Project Vic, the global effort to investigate crimes against children that now provides the world’s most comprehensive unified missing/exploited children database. Within this feature set, Exterro’s new Explicit Image Detection feature provides a mental health shield for investigators by guarding against unnecessary exposure to graphic material during forensic review.

The FTK suite, however, is also highly suitable for corporate teams conducting internal investigations, as digital misconduct, data breaches and ransomware attacks are increasingly common. To manage these challenges, companies scan for Indicators of Compromise (IOC) to identify malicious activity before the damage accelerates.

Exterro’s latest version of the FTK Suite will provide IOC identification as an AI-enabled element of its digital forensics toolkit. If a security event is already in-progress, the quick detection of an IOC can help contain attacks earlier in the lifecycle, thus limiting impact to the business.

FTK’s ability to identify IOCs allows corporations to contain the threat earlier. Corporate investigators can use IOC identification technology to respond quickly, remotely and covertly while maintaining chain of custody and can collect data from anywhere at any time, including off-network endpoints and cloud data sources.

“This newest version of the FTK product family highlights our commitment to innovation as well as our deep understanding of the needs of investigation teams worldwide,” said Harsh Behl, Director of Product Management at Exterro. “It allows our clients to perform Mac investigations like never before. We are the first in the market to clearly reconstruct and display the native Apple Mail and Outlook for Mac email formats, as well as associate all of the email attachments— even as our competitors continue to struggle bringing these features to market.”

Key elements of the product suite enhancements are as follows:

• Significant processing speed efficiencies deliver processing times 10x faster than the competition
• Collect from up to 20,000 endpoints at once with scalable endpoint collection
• Integrated offline language translation for cross-border investigations and multilingual data sets
• AI-based video recognition eliminates hours of manual video review by automatically flagging points of interest
• Built-in OCR Processing powered by ABBYY for unmatched text recognition, accuracy and speed
• FTK connect drives workflow automation, including automatic endpoint collection through seamless integration with cybersecurity platforms
• Interactive, customizable, cross-case dashboards for full transparency and insight into case data