504ENSICS Releases Digital Forensics Tool: SPOTLIGHT INSPECTOR

504ENSICS Labs just released Spotlight Inspector, a free application for computer forensic investigation of Mac OSX computers. Until now, there has never been an effective cross-platform forensics tool for accessing Spotlight internal data from Mac OSX systems – which is where all of the information about files indexed on a computer can be accessed by forensic investigators. This information gathering is crucial to Digital Investigators.

Similar to Crime Scene Forensics, where investigators are able to recover fingerprints and other traces of evidence, Digital Forensics investigators have their own set of tools to peer into computers – where files, like fingerprints, leave traces of evidence. This tool was developed by 504ENSICS, a Network Security and Digital Forensics firm based in New Orleans, through a research grant from the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The end result: a new tool for computer forensic investigators.

Downloading Spotlight Inspector

An updated version of Spotlight (v1.1 Beta) was released in March 2014. For details on the update, please check out the post here and download it here.

A Brief Overview of Computer Forensics:

Computer forensics is the science of determining what actions have been performed on a computer under investigation. This can include when files were created or modified, what web sites a user has visited, recovering deleted files and much, much more. In addition to practicing forensics for our clients, we are also active researchers in the field.