Magnet AXIOM Cyber: A Year in Review

What. A. Year! So much has happened since AXIOM Cyber launched in January of 2020.  

In the span of a just under one year: Magnet AXIOM Cyber has had 10 monthly product updates, has seen the addition of 65 new artifacts supported with 100+ artifacts updated, and has added so many new features most of which came from feedback directly from our userbase. 

Let’s take a look back at 2020 for AXIOM Cyber and review some of the more notable feature additions. 

AXIOM Cyber Launches with Remote Acquisition and Corporate Cloud Support 

It may seem a bit odd that the very first version number for a new product would be 3.9, however not for AXIOM Cyber. That’s because AXIOM Cyber leverages the backbone of its sister product for Law Enforcement agencies, Magnet AXIOM. 

Magnet AXIOM Cyber had a tremendous head start and was already a fully mature product at launch, but 3.9 was the very first purposeful step into the corporate market. It heralded the introduction of two unique features specific to enterprise business: remote acquisition and the ability to collect from cloud services, specifically AWS S3 buckets and EC2 instances, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. 

Now corporate examiners had a new tool to add to their arsenal of digital forensics tools to tackle some of the biggest challenges—data breaches, insider threats, fraud, malware & ransomware, employee misconduct and more—that were facing their business. 

With AXIOM Cyber 4.0, we quickly followed up in support for acquiring from Microsoft Azure VMs and remote acquisition support for Macs that are SIP and T2 chip enabled. 

Introduction of AFF4-L Images: A Forensically Sound Logical Container 

This was a feature request that we heard loud and clear from the market: the need for a forensically sound container. Although at its inception, AXIOM Cyber’s remote collections were—and still are if you choose—saved to a zip folder including a text file with metadata about the collection to prove its forensic integrity, that simply wasn’t good enough for some customers. 

In AXIOM Cyber 4.5 we introduced the ability to save logical remote collections in the AFF4-L format. AFF4-L is a vendor-neutral, open standard designed specifically for forensic imaging, giving you confidence that the integrity of your evidence is maintained. 

AXIOM Cyber 4.8 

That leads us to AXIOM Cyber 4.8 which saw the addition of not one, not two, but three huge features that our customers have been asking us for since we launched Magnet AXIOM Cyber! 

1. Off-Network Collections 

Magnet AXIOM Cyber enables you to reliably acquire data from endpoints that aren’t connected to the corporate network. With the remote and work from home workforce larger than ever (and will most likely remain forever changed), it’s almost inevitable that you’ll have to collect data from an endpoint that is off-network. 

For a walkthrough of how to remotely collect data from an off-network corporate endpoint, we’ve put together a blog, Harnessing the Cloud to Collect Off-Network Endpoints using AXIOM Cyber to help you out. 

2. Run AXIOM Cyber in the Cloud 

Many of our customers are already leveraging the cloud to run the applications and services that drive their business. The benefits of the cloud result in cost savings, flexibility, and the ability to access services and information anywhere in the world. Our customers wanted to experience these benefits with AXIOM Cyber as well, so we delivered.  

Also in 4.8, we enabled and simplified the ability for you to run AXIOM Cyber in an AWS EC2 instance! 

3. OCR Support 

Lastly, in 4.8, we also introduced OCR support to Magnet AXIOM Cyber 

With new OCR technology built-in to AXIOM Cyber, you can easily extract text embedded in PDFs and pictures or scanned documents to quickly find additional evidence using global keyword search. 

This is especially helpful for those examiners who are also supporting e-Discovery. The OCR text extracted from scans done by AXIOM Cyber are included in an HTML export which can then be used throughout the e-Discovery process. 

For more on our OCR support, give this article a read: Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). 

So What’s Next? 

Well, we’re excited for 2021—yes, partly because 2020 will finally be behind us—but also because we have big plans for 2021. 

As we look at 2021 and beyond as a whole, we’ll be working diligently to mature AXIOM Cyber for our corporate customers continuing to add and enhance functionality that will make it an essential tool for corporate examiners. 

As a bonus—just because you read all the way to the end—we wanted to share some exciting news for our friends supporting eDiscovery. We’ve heard from folks who have found our cloud collection capabilities extremely useful in the collection and preservation process but struggled with getting this data out of AXIOM Cyber and into legal review tools. 

For those customers we’re excited to announce that we plan to release support for exporting data into Concordance/Relativity load files (.dat files), complete with natives and text. We’ll continue to work to better support customers looking to use AXIOM Cyber in eDiscovery workflows, so keep the feedback coming! 

That’s it! We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in 2020 and how we’ve helped hundreds of our corporate customers get to the truth of their investigations quickly. 

If you’re looking to join us in 2021 and don’t have AXIOM Cyber yet, a free trial is a great place to started. Request a free trial today!