Is your image embedded in a PDF file? No worries, Amped Authenticate can handle that!

Welcome to this week’s Tip Tuesday! Today we are showing you an interesting, perhaps a bit hidden, functionality of Amped Authenticate. There is no need to introduce the PDF file format: it is surely the most widespread format for sharing digital documents. Therefore, it may easily happen that you have to deal with a PDF containing images and that some of them get questioned.

What would you do in such a case (after realizing that if you drag-and-drop the PDF into Amped Authenticate, nothing happens, because it’s not an image file)? Would you take a screen capture of the picture and work with that? “Nooo!” – I hope you said! Screenshots are evil for image forensics! Ok, you would get some pixels to work with, but you would lose all metadata, you would lose encoding properties, you could be recompressing data… That means you cannot check image integrity, and finding manipulations becomes much harder. No, there’s a better way of dealing with images embedded in PDFs, and we’ll show you how!

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See you at the Digital Investigations Conference in Vienna

On March 20, the Amped team is heading to Vienna, Austria for the DIC (Digital Investigations Conference).

The conference is a platform for computer forensics experts and vendors, partners and sponsors working in the areas of Digital Investigations and E-Discovery. It offers independent lectures and workshops to develop technical skills and to learn more about software and hardware solutions in the market. The event will focus on law enforcement, government and military, businesses, law firms, consultants and academic organizations.

Come by our booth to learn about Amped Software’s full line of solutions that have been developed to assist an entire organization with all investigations, starting from the field, up to the forensic lab, and then to the courtroom.

And don’t miss our presentation scheduled from 11:45-12:30 in Lecture Hall 50 where you will learn more about Amped Software’s Ecosystem for Forensic Image and Video Analysis.

For more info about the event click here.

See you there!

VeriFIVE your files (aka “How to hash-check files in your Amped FIVE project”)

As you smart forensic analysts have undoubtedly noticed, last week there was no Tip Tuesday. Did we forget? Well, not really… We just realized that no Tip could stand the bright light shone by last Tuesday’s great announcement: the launch of Amped Replay, Amped Software’s newest solution for investigators and frontline officers! If you happened to miss that news read more about it here!

After that, you can enjoy this week’s Tip Tuesday!

If you are working in the digital forensic field, you are certainly aware of the importance of data integrity. Ensuring data integrity means to verify that the information you are working on remains unaltered during the whole process (including transmission and storage of data).

Unfortunately, when it comes to digital images and videos, integrity is more threatened than with other types of files. For example, if you rotate an image using your OS default photo viewer and then close it, the file will likely be overwritten without any advice. While in many cases the changes made to pixels may be “negligible”, the file will still change… which means its hash value will be different. And we know this could invalidate your whole analysis (in the end, another analyst cannot know why the hash is different, it’s just different).

At Amped, we take data integrity very seriously. Our software never overwrites nor moves the evidence file you are working with. But there’s more:
Amped FIVE provides you with a seamless way of checking data integrity straight inside your project. And this Tuesday’s Tip tells you how!

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Amped Replay: The Enhanced Video Player for Modern Policing

Today we have launched Amped Replay, our enhanced video player for modern policing.

You can find all the usual details in the press release and more info on the product webpages. What I want to add here, though, is some background information about the why and how of this new product.

I believe Amped Replay may be the most important product launch since the initial Amped FIVE release in 2008. Maybe even more than that, since it widens our scope as a company. Continue reading →

See you at Forensics Europe Expo in London – where great things are going to happen!

From Tuesday, March 5th – Wednesday, March 6th Amped will be at Forensics Europe Expo in Olympia, London.

Forensics Europe Expo is dedicated to forensic science and is a primary meeting place for thousands of senior buyers looking to source the latest technological innovations on the market.

Following 6 successful years, the 7th edition will – for the first time – take place on the same show floor as Security & Counter Terror Expo at Olympia, London. As part of UK Security Week, Forensics Europe Expo will connect together the industry’s entire supply chain and provide an all-in-one platform to engage with the most senior decision makers and procurement specialists. 

Attracting 1,500+ international forensics professionals from the Government, Law Enforcement, Laboratories, Private Sector, Military, Legal Sector, Universities and Intelligence Sector, Forensics Europe Expo 2019 will continue to be the most important forum of discussion and debate for the global forensics community.

If you are at the event, or in the area, don’t forget to stop by the Amped Software Stand FE227 to see what we’ve been developing for the security and forensics community!

I look forward to meeting you there!

Quick Triage with Amped Authenticate’s Batch File Format Analysis Can Save You Lots of Time

Dear Amped friends, welcome to this week’s Tip Tuesday!

In our last Tip we’ve talked about how Amped FIVE users can save time by trimming and cropping the video they’re working on, so to focus the analysis only on interesting parts. Probably, we opted for that topic because February is the shortest month, and it may give you the feeling that time flows away too quickly. Since we can’t stop time, let’s at least save it when possible!

This week is Amped Authenticate‘s turn, so let’s see how we can save time when investigating our digital images. Once more, it’s a matter of focus: to save time, we have to focus the analysis on the right images (i.e., properly select them) and run only the analysis filters that we need on them. We will focus on the first aspect today, and leave the second for a coming-soon Tip.

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DVRConv Update 12801: Support for More New Formats, Format Variants and Timestamps

We’re here with another update for Amped DVRConv, one of the fastest ways to cleanly convert multiple video files.

Amped DVRConv remains one of the top go-to tools for practitioners who need to convert video quickly, cleanly and easily. It’s my first choice when I have a large amount of video files that I need playable – I simply drag and drop my files into Amped DVRConv and it does the work for me in the background, while I am free to work on other processing!

It’s also great if you are out in the field and need to convert video on the go, ready for when you return to the lab for input into Amped FIVE or to pass onto colleagues or other agencies. The great thing is, the original files are always preserved and log files created with each conversion, meaning your original video evidence is always kept secure.

We know how many different standard and proprietary video formats are out there and how frustrating it can be to come across a new format that you just can’t seem to do anything with.

For this reason, we are constantly working to add support for more formats that you send to us and in this update, we’ve done just that!

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Trim, Crop and Watch Processing Time Drop!

Digital videos are constantly getting more and more bulky. Nowadays it is not uncommon to work on CCTV footage with resolution above Full-HD, sometimes even 4k. Unfortunately, this huge gain in resolution is often frustrated by extremely aggressive compression (at the end of the day, the video must fit into a DVR hard drive). And there is one more collateral effect of working with hi-res videos: the processing time increases.

Even if you are running Amped FIVE on a powerful computer, you may experience a significant slow-down when applying some filters to your footage. Remember that Amped FIVE processes your video in “live mode”: all filters in the chain are applied on-the-fly, and the result is rendered on the screen. If you feel the video is not playing fast enough, today’s Tuesday Tip is here to help you!

 

Our suggestion is to focus your analysis on the portion of footage that really matters, both in time and space.

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