Artifact Exchange Opens Today for Sharing Custom Artifacts
New Artifact Exchange community allows examiners to upload and/or download artifacts made using Magnet AXIOM’s Custom Artifacts feature
We have launched our Artifact Exchange! Forensics professionals can now share their Custom Artifacts with each other for use in their investigations. We have worked with our team and the community to launch the Artifact Exchange with over 50 apps already available, like Kik, Bleep and ICQ for example. And each app, as you know, can be built to recover multiple artifacts!
Watch our video!
The Artifact Exchange – a Community for Everyone
When we first announced that we would be opening an Artifact Exchange, we immediately heard from the community that everyone would like to be part of this exchange and provide help and support to each other through artifacts.
In light of this response (and because we have always said that we listen to our customers and the community, and we stand by that), we are making the artifact exchange open to the community. Simply visit the Artifact Exchange and create an account (yes, we are still going to ask for some info from you, but we want to protect the community from any malware or ne’er-do-wells).
Although the community-at-large can upload and download artifacts, each artifact in the exchange will use the AXIOM API, which means that the artifacts will integrate quickly and easily into AXIOM for use in investigations.
We launched the Artifact Exchange for a couple of reasons:
- Community – we wanted to provide a place where the community can share work and collaborate with each other to build better cases. The forensics community is great about helping each other out and this is a great way to help foster that.
- Artifacts, Artifacts, Artifacts – the number of apps available is growing at a phenomenal rate. Between new app fads, new ways of storing data within apps, the vastly different types of data that might be stored in an apps, and the number of versions of any given app that are available at the same time, it is nearly impossible to support recovery of data from all apps in a way that provides deep, relevant results. The Artifact Exchange is a way to give the community the tools they need to bridge any gaps in unsupported apps.
New Python Support
Also announced today was Magnet AXIOM’s Python support for building Custom Artifacts. Previously, customers could use AXIOM’s Custom Artifacts to build XML-based artifacts. XML as a more common language makes it easy to use our templates and samples to build out integration to unsupported artifacts. Our support for Python will allow examiners to build integration for artifacts that can go deeper in terms of the ways they recover data.
The support for XML and Python means that people who have already built scripts or artifacts in other formats should have a clear path for porting their work without too much additional effort.
We have some great documentation available on the Artifact Exchange to help people build, share and use Custom Artifacts, including code samples, templates, and examples.
While our teams work on those features, we would like to know what artifacts you are working on and what artifacts you would like to see built. We will share those ideas and promote your work here on the blog and in some of our other customer communications. Send your thoughts to me – rick.andrade@magnetforensics.com.