Introduction

This release brings support for a number of new browsers and artefacts including support for the changes made in Apple Safari v8. All of the SQLite recovery engines have been updated resulting in an increase in performance and accuracy.

New Features

In addition to extending support for the existing browsers and their recent changes, we have now added support for two new browsers:

For a full list of supported artefacts, please see the following: Supported Browsers

Apple Safari History

Apple Safari v8 was released with OS X Yosemite and brought with it a change to its history storage. As a result, HstEx® v4.1 has been updated to support the recovery of individual entries from Safari v8 history records. History records are split across History Items and Visits. We offer an option to recover both types.


Improvements

We have been working hard to increase the performance, accuracy and stability of HstEx® v4. As a result, we have updated all of our SQLite recovery engines to ensure they are accurate and fast. We have improved the handling and reporting of corrupt entries (partially recovered records are flagged in NetAnalysis® v2). We have also made some improvements to the recovery of Binary Plist data.

Firefox v32+ Cache v2

Mozilla Firefox officially released their new caching backend with the release of Firefox v32 back in September 2014. The structure is completely different from that used previously. HstEx® v4.0 was the first forensic tool to support the recovery of deleted Mozilla Firefox Cache v2 records. After Firefox v33 was released, Mozilla made some further changes to the file format. HstEx® v4 supports all the currently released formats of Mozilla's Cache v2 structure. We have also made some further improvements to the recovery of Cache v2 records, in particular the identification of corrupt data.

Keyword Search Terms

We have extended support for the recovery of individual keyword search terms for all Chromium based browsers and have improved the recovery of very large keyword strings.

Change Log

You can find the complete change log for HstEx® v4.1 here: