This review was provided by students who took the Digital Forensics course offered by the University of Crete’s Computer Science Department. They have used Belkasoft X as a part of their curriculum.
"The overall user interface experience was really good. I could easily find whatever I needed."
About the University
The University of Crete is a multi-disciplinary, research-oriented institution in the island of Crete, Greece, and one of the country's most academically acclaimed and reputable ones.
The University ranked 62nd in The Times Higher Education (THE) 2018 list of the top universities aged 50 years or under. Moreover, according to the "World University Rankings" 2019, 2020, and 2021, the University of Crete was ranked first among all Universities in Greece.
About the course
The aim of the Digital Forensics course is to present methods, current best practices and standards to follow when investigating a criminal case involving digital devices, including mobile phones. The course elaborates on how to handle evidence on the scene, how to acquire evidence, how to preserve integrity, how to utilize open source and commercial forensics tools, how to verify the evidence presented by tools, how to write reports and how to properly testify in court. In this course, students learn how to best use the forensics tools to analyze digital evidence in order to make an efficient and high-quality investigation. This includes tools to circumvent security hardening, to acquire more information from challenging devices, to decode, and analyses the artefacts pertinent for any criminal investigation.
About the professor
The course is taught by Dr. Harry Manifavas, who holds the position of Senior Research Collaborator at ICS-FORTH. His experience and expertise lie in the area of Cybersecurity. His current areas of interest include cybercrime and digital forensics. Prior to his current role he worked as an academic in a number of universities, technical coordinator in a number of EU funded research projects, consultant in the private sector, security engineer for a UK investment bank, and as a research assistant at Cambridge University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, his MSc in Communication Systems Engineering from the KENT University, and his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Crete (Greece).
The survey
20 students took a quiz after the course to rate their satisfaction with the tool. Their answers can be found below.
How would you rate the application?
How satisfied were you with the product?
Is the user interface easy to understand?
Is it easy to navigate through the application?
Did the application crash?
Did the application live up to your expectations?
What did you find most useful or enjoyable?
"Not having to use multiple applications."
"The interface is pretty smooth so keep it that way."
"File system navigation was quite understandable."
"The auto search results and findings helps you to come fast to conclusions."
"The graph feature."
"Easy to use."
"The ability to find useful information through custom searches."
"The UI was really well designed, it was easy to use from the beginning."
"The timeline tab and the connection/communication graph."
"Finding pictures."
"The connection graph."
"The picture representation."
"Themes, user interface, plenty of automatically detected artifacts."
"The overall UI experience was really good. I could easily find whatever I needed."
"The visualization of chats."
"Easy to navigate UI, nice clean artifact view."
"The ability to search for specific content in artifacts like pornography or face recognition!"
"UI."
"Easy and intuitive UI."
"Clean and understandable UI."
"Really useful File Explorer."
"Very useful and clean communication/chat preview."
Would you buy the application for professional use?
Conclusion
During the course, students have learned the basic principles of digital forensics and how to identify the unique challenges involved in mobile forensics. They have compared various data acquisition and analysis techniques used in digital forensics. They have utilized open source and commercial forensics tools, including Belkasoft X. As you can see from the survey answers, most student were satisfied with Belkasoft X, praising user-friendly easy to understand interface, file system navigation, comprehensive picture analysis, chat representation and connection graph.
Belkasoft is proud to support Universities and Colleges teaching Digital Forensics, Incident Response, and general Cyber Security. Established by a former University lecturer, the company realizes the importance of the support of young specialists and future professionals who will secure our safety as Law Enforcement and private investigators or responders.
See also