Guidances Investigative Features Receive U.S. Patent

Guidance Software announced Feb. 2 that their latest digital investigative feature has been patented by the United States Patent and Trademark office.

Guidance Softwares newest patent, known as “Automatic Reconnect and Reacquisition in a Computer Investigation System”, will be integrated into Guidance Softwares EnCase Enterprise platform, which is designed to perform thorough computer investigations such as intellectual property theft, incident response and compliance auditing.

“Automatic reconnection mechanisms existed in the past,” Brian Karney, director of product marketing and management for Guidance Software, told eWEEK. “However, with these devices, the manual restart forced investigators to start the acquisition process over from the beginning.”

The patented feature, which has been part of the product since the release of EnCase Enterprise version 5 in June of 2005, enables EnCase Enterprise users to acquire data from their computers during a system investigation, even if the users computer gets disconnected.

If the connection is lost during the investigation, Guidance Softwares patent allows users to reconnect and restart the acquisition from a checkpoint.

“Customers can effectively acquire and analyze machines in the harshest network environments ranging from contended corporate WANs to wireless LANs,” said Karney.

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The checkpoint functionality will also allow users to automatically reconnect and restart the acquisition, using their current set of collected data.

“This feature enables organizations to fulfill their investigative and collection needs across an enterprise without having to worry about the network being 100 percent or losing valuable work once a machine is temporarily shut down,” Karney said.

Karney added that Guidance continues to help customers with investigative challenges as they “recently added the ability to process computers that are not connected directly to the corporate network, which enables organizations to capture information from remote workers any time they are connected to the Internet.”

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