The Autopsy is a forensic tool which is used by the military, law enforcement, and corporate examiners to investigate what had happened on a smartphone or a computer. The Autopsy has a plug-in architecture which allows the user to find add-on modules or even develop custom modules written in Java or Python.
Main features of Autopsy are:
- Multi-User Cases: Collaborate with your fellow examiners on large cases.
- Keyword Search: Text extraction and the index searched modules allow you to find the files which mention specific terms and find the regular expression patterns.
- Timeline Analysis: Displays system events in a graphical interface to help identify activity.
- Web Artefacts: Extracts web activity from common browsers to help identify user activity.
- LNK File Analysis: Identifies shortcuts and accessed documents.
- Email Analysis: Parses MBOX format messages, such as Thunderbird.
- Registry Analysis: Uses RegRipper to identify recently accessed documents and USB devices.
- EXIF: Extracts geolocation and camera information from JPEG files.
- File Type Sorting: Group files by their type to find all images or documents.
- Media Playback: View videos and images in the application and not require an external viewer.
- Thumbnail viewer: Displays thumbnail of images to help quick view pictures.
- Robust File System Analysis: Support for common file systems, including NTFS, FAT12/FAT16/FAT32/ExFAT, HFS+, ISO9660 (CD-ROM), Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, Yaffs2, and UFS from The Sleuth Kit.
- Hash Set Filtering: Filter knew good files using NSRL and flags known bad files using custom hash sets in HashKeeper, md5sum, and EnCase formats.
- Tags: Tag files with arbitrary tag names, such as ‘bookmark’ or ‘suspicious’, and add comments.
- Unicode Strings Extraction: Extracts strings from unallocated space and unknown file types in many languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.).
- File Type Detection based on signatures and extension mismatch detection.
- Interesting Files Module will flag files and folders based on name and path.
- Android Support: Extracts data from SMS, call logs, contacts, Tango, Words with Friends, and more.