Yuri's blog: Working from the paradise

Recently, I was surprised by an unexpected popularity of my very short post about my planned (not so) lazy day during my vacation on Maldives. The post was accompanied by a photo of my laptop with the first slide of Belkasoft X launch presentation and beautiful blue waters of Indian Ocean. Being laconic, it gathered few tens of thousands of views and few hundred likes, a record breaking for my posts on the LinkedIn platform.

Here is the post by the way.

Inspired by the unexpected success, I decided to write a series of small posts about Maldives' underwater creatures and... digital forensics, united under the name 'Working from the paradise'.

Meet the issue number one!

Issue 1: The mobster fish

One particular fish, which amazed me during the very first snorkel, was mobster fish. The name was given to that fish by myself and was derived from the fish behavior. It was very brutal.

To begin with, the fish itself was totally brutal. It was moving with the mouth open, its huge teeth (not to say tusks) looked scary even for me, a human few times larger.

Not scary? Please see another photo (not mine)

The mobster was using its teeth to bite and crush corals, to take impressively big stones and move them away to find food under. Particularly spectacular was its blowing out water, what was causing a small sandstorm around.

Finally, the crushinator found what it was looking for: an ice-cream-shaped shellfish. Now, it started to destroy the shell to extract a poor prey out of it. It looked very spectacular, either, like a jet-fighter approaching the target, the mobster fish was rising up a bit, making a turn and then accelerating down to bite one more inch of the shell. Every attack was taking a while, so smaller and quicker (and brave enough) fish were trying to steal a bit of the mobster’s catch.

In a few minutes, it was over. Only a tip of the shell was left, the mollusk inside was completely eaten, and our ways with the mobster have parted.

Funny enough, on the very last day, sitting in the plane, which was about to depart from our paradise island, I was reading an article 'Dangerous fish of Maldives' (very smart and timely move!). Shockingly, I immediately recognized my mobster fish, which was one of the first in the list. It was called Titan Trigger fish, and I became glad I did not know this before, when chasing it, because the fish is notoriously known for its lack of fear of human and also for attacking divers. No surprise it looked evil to me, and that’s why I think my name given to it is better than the real one.

* * *

Like the mobster-fish, Belkasoft X can crush your data sources to find hidden artifacts. Its powerful file system analysis and signature-based carving gives you more than 1000 different types of artifacts and formats out of the box. WhatsApp and Skype, Telegram and Viber, Signal and Wickr, Chrome and Firefox, Outlook and Apple Mail, pictures and videos, SQLite databases and audio, bitcoin transactions and wallets, heartbeat from fitness trackers and rides from taxi apps, TikTok and World of Warcraft... The product can look inside the darkest corners of a device, including snapshots, slack and unallocated space. It aggressively uses your forensic computer's CPU (though, this can be tuned, if you like to run another tool in parallel).

And it can attack divers.

Kidding.