Research Area:  Digital Forensics

Abstract:

The rapid growth in usage and application of Social Networking (SN) platforms make them a potential target by cyber criminals to conduct malicious activities such as identity theft, piracy, illegal trading, sexual harassment, cyber stalking and cyber terrorism. Many SN platforms are extending their services to mobile platforms, making them an important source of evidence in cyber investigation cases. Therefore, understanding the types of potential evidence of users’ SN activities available on mobile devices is crucial to forensic investigation and research. In this paper, we examine four popular SN applications: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, on Android and iOS platforms, to detect remnants of users’ activities that are of forensic interest. We detect a variety of artefacts (e.g. usernames, passwords, login information, personal information, uploaded posts, exchanged messages and uploaded comments from SN applications) that could facilitate a criminal investigation.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Farhood Norouzizadeh Dezfouli,Ali Dehghantanha,Brett Eterovic-Soric and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Publisher name:  Taylor and Francis

DOI:  10.1080/00450618.2015.1066854

Volume Information:  Volume 48, 2016 - Issue 4

Paper Link:   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00450618.2015.1066854