This report presents product information on the Skout Collect from Skout Forensics, as well as results from testing its performance by the National Institute of Justice's Electronic Crime Technology Center of Excellence.
The Skout Collect is designed to image target computers with a portable external hard drive. An investigator purchases or configures a Skout Collect drive and sends it to the location of the target computer. The drive is then connected to the Target system; automated collection software is executed via a boot CD or Windows executable, and the drive is returned to the investigator for further analysis. The Skout Collect Drive comes in varying sizes of collection hard drives and is designed to be used until the drive is full. A second version is an Enterprise solution that allows any drive to be configured as a Skout Collect drive with a pay-as-you-go structure in increments of 1 TB each. Skout Forensics also sells a number of accessories, such as bootable thumb-drives, foam-lined cases, and high-speed drive adapters that enable faster collection times for target computers. Performance testing determined that Skout Collect and Skout Enterprise performed as advertised in most instances. During the Skout Collection CD test, only the Toshiba laptop could not be imaged due to a graphics driver issue. There was also a graphical issue with the Mac-book Air that could be worked around. The vendor was informed of these graphical issues and expects to have a fix released in August 2012. All other tests performed as expected. Results are presented for each of eight tests. Extensive figures