Forensic examination of social networking applications on smartphones

Considering the trends of social interaction and relationship, online social networking has greatly impacted the everyday human. People can now easily connect to their social circles through their smart devices, so much so that social networking via smart devices is becoming preferable choice by users. This appealing nature of smart devices to forensic examiners is due to presence of digital artefacts in these devices. Forensic investigators can extract possible evidence by selecting appropriate extraction techniques and forensic tools and by following proper chain of custody and documentation. The prime contribution of this research emphasizes on performing digital forensics in smart devices on three of the renowned and perhaps the top most utilized social networking apps that are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These forensics examinations were carried out on four of the dominant smartphones brands that are Apple iPhones, Android, Windows and BlackBerry devices. The basic purpose of the forensic examination and tests was focused on discovering if the internal memory of the smartphones stores the activities and actions performed through these social networking apps. From the outcomes of these results, it was concluded that not even bits of data or evidence could be extracted from BlackBerry smartphones. On the other hand, a substantial volume of important information is kept in case of Android & Windows devices and Apple iPhone. This valuable information can be extracted by forensic examiners for future analysis in the case.