Research Area: Digital Forensics
WeChat is one of the most popular instant-messaging smartphone applications in the world. At the end of 2015, WeChat had 697 million monthly active users from over 200 countries. Although WeChat was designed originally for communication between relatives and friends, its abundant social functions are now also used by criminals for communication, and even for the organization and coordination of criminal acts. Therefore, communication records of social networking services like WeChat extracted from the smartphones of criminals are always the vital digital evidences for the investigation and prosecution of criminal cases. At present, only a few literatures focused on WeChat forensics. This paper describes several common questions that arise in forensic examinations of Android WeChat and provides corresponding technical methods that are useful to address these questions. This paper is intended to provide vital references for the investigators and researchers working on the digital forensics.
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Author(s) Name: Songyang Wu, Xupeng Wang, Yong Zhang, Xiong Xiong, Lin Du
Journal name: Digital Investigation
Conferrence name:
Publisher name: ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.diin.2016.11.002
Volume Information: Volume 21, June 2017, Pages 3-10
