What TRIM, DRAT, and DZAT Really Mean for SSD Forensics
June 2nd, 2025 by Oleg Afonin
If you’re doing forensic work today, odds are you’re imaging SSDs, not just spinning hard drives. And SSDs don’t behave like HDDs – especially when it comes to deleted files. One key reason: the TRIM command. TRIM makes SSDs behave different to magnetic hard drives when it comes to recovering deleted evidence. This article breaks down what TRIM actually does, how SSDs respond, and what forensic experts need to know when handling modern storage.
Intel Gulftown
April 21st, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
New member of Core i7 family: six cores, hyper-threading, and some new instructions — including ones for AES encryption. Unfortunately, useless for our password-cracking purposes: most password-checking routines are based on SHA-1. But anyway, an ability to run 12 threads at a time will definitely increase the performance. We’ll see (in Q1’2010). More info at Tom’s Hardware.
NVIDIA GT300
April 20th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
According to The Inquirer, Nvidia GT300 promised in October. Should be a good video card for GPU-accelerated password cracking :).
How to grow your graphics card effectiveness
April 17th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Water cooling, liquid nitrogen, and dry ice – which gets the most of your ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card? Learn it from Zac O’Vadka today’s post.
E-Discovery
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
If you have no idea what E-Discovery is, read Crossing the E-Discovery Border: IT and Legal. But if you do, I’d recommend attending this webinar anyway 🙂
Password cracking with Microsoft cofee
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
No, it’s no a typo :). COFEE means Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, actually. Never heard about it? Then read Microsoft supplies Interpol with DIY forensics tool. Just don’t ask where to get it. We have not seen it either.
NEW: Rainbow Tables for password-protected Excel spreadsheets
April 16th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
And now…. we have Rainbow Tables for Microsoft Excel docs with 40-bit encryption. So, it became possible to reach near-instant recovery of 97% of spreadsheets created in MS Excel 97-2003. Unfortunately, due to specificity of Excel spreadsheets format it’s unreal to get 100%-recovery, still, you can use brute force to cover the rest 3%.
Electronic records security and encryption
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
Sad information: Hackers grab more than 285M records in 2008. Just curious, how about Sarbanes-Oxley Act, does it really work? 🙂
Microsoft Office 14
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
According to CNET News, Office 14 technical preview will be available in Q3, and release version in the first half of 2010; Office 2010 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
New ATI Radeon card
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
The only our product that works with ATI cards (right now) is Wireless Security Auditor, but interesting news anyway: ATI Radeon HD 4770 Info Leaked. I’ll second the editor’s opinion that it will make a good competition to NVIDIA’a 9800GT (of course, supported by EWSA, too).
“I bet you want the password, bet you wanna log in?”
April 16th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Nice lyrics stirs up hacker’s morning drowsy feelings 🙂
