A Case Study for Forensic Investigation Concerning Malformed Flash Drive and Unknown Graphic Image Files

Abstract

Under the UC infrastructures, hundreds of thousands of digital graphics images are distributed via mobile devices as well as PCs encompassing from on-line auctions to e-mail attachments. Although different graphics files are with distinct file formats, they contain unique characteristics within their file headers, which provide essential guidelines for DF specialists when they confront with the uncharted clues during the digital investigation. Nowadays, digital images are widely used in the Internet communicating activities and this raises the security issue alert due to the factor that Internet criminal behaviors are exhaustively spreading worldwide. Steganography is widely integrated with the graphics files, which is one kind of information hiding technique. Apparently, steganography was utilized to hide confidential messages or information in many occasions from leisure purpose to crime motivation or even the propagation of terrorism information using the Internet on-line forums as the platform. Only insiders or the DF specialists are capable of retrieving the invisible messages, which result in a great challenge to information security in FCC.