E-fense has published a new version of their acclaimed Helix Forensic Live CD. It is now in version 2.0.

UPDATE: Helix3 is no longer a free product. e-Fense decided to make it a commercial product

Just as the old version, the new one contains two major components

• A LiveCD (Based on Ubuntu) - A full blown forensic toolkit with a nice all-encompassing set of tools.
• Windows set of tools - which allow the user to use a subset of forensic tools within a running windows system (most often during first response).
  

The Windows toolkit is maintaining the same interface as before, but the windows based application set is coherent, there are no missing applications. The previous version had a number of links in the windows toolkit that weren't working, which could cause a lot of grief at the wrong time.

Just a reminder of the Windows Helix Menu


The Linux LiveCD interface has seen a major overhaul. It is now based on Gnome, and the overall interface is much better organized.

The following screenshot depicts the new Helix boot menu


Unfortunately, probably in search of a better overall performance, it is departing the Forensic track and moving much more into mainstream - The toolkit is missing a lot of nice new Forensic tools that could have been installed and utilized. Hopefully, they'll be included in the next version.
There is one new major feature that was missing from the previous version - the LiveCD can now be installed on a hard drive - effectively creating a full blown Forensic investigation computer without the need to lug around a bootable CD.

The installer suffers from several bugs, so make sure you partition the target hard drive manually - the automatic option doesn't work

The following Screenshot depicts the installed version of Helix


The new version of Helix is much easier to use and overall a much more completed product.

UPDATE: Helix3 is no longer a free product. e-Fene decided to make it a commercial product


Talkback and comments are most welcome

Related Posts
Tutorial - Computer Forensics Process for Begginners
Tutorial - Computer Forensics Evidence Collection