Abstract
Physical memory acquisition has been an import facet for digital forensics (DF) specialists due to its volatile characteristics. Nowadays, thousands of millions of global participants utilize online social networking (OSN) mechanisms to expand their social lives, ranging from business-oriented purposes to leisure motivations. Facebook (FB) is one of the most dominant social networking sites (SNS) available today. Unfortunately, it has been a major avenue for cybercriminals to commit illegal activities. Therefore, the digital traces of previous sessions of an FB user play an essential role as the first step for DF experts to pursue the disclosure of the identity of the suspect who was exploiting FB. In this research work, we provide a systematic methodology to reveal a previous session of an FB identity, as well as his/her partial social circle via collecting, analyzing, preserving and presenting the associated digital traces to obtain the online social snapshots of a specific FB user who was utilizing a computing device with Internet Explorer (IE) 10 without turning off the power of the gadget. This novel approach can be a paradigm for how DF specialists ponder the crime scene to conduct the first response in order to avoid the permanent loss of the precious digital evidence in previous FB sessions. The hash values of the image files of the random access memory (RAM) of the computing device have proven to be identical before and after forensics operations, which could be probative evidence in a court of law.
Highlights
Mobile smart gadgets or traditional desktop computing devices are phenomenally exploited to access social media and cloud-based application programs, like Facebook (FB), Twitter, Snapchat, and others [1,2]
We provide the design of an experiment to illustrate volatile digital traces, which are capable of being used to sketch the profile of an FB user using Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows
There are some urgent concerns with the noncompliance of information security in private sectors that need to be responded to in a timely manner, for which it is not suitable for law enforcement agencies to get involved under the time constraints
Summary
Mobile smart gadgets or traditional desktop computing devices are phenomenally exploited to access social media and cloud-based application programs, like Facebook (FB), Twitter, Snapchat, and others [1,2]. There are always some intangible digital traces accidentally left behind the scenes, where indecent behaviors might have been deliberately or unintentionally conducted. Digital forensics (DF) arises encompassing business transaction fields to personal entertainment on websites. We apply DF along with systematic and scientific methodologies to data extraction from social networking sites (SNSs), which has become an imminently important research field. The associated forensic data collection is tightly connected to social network operators. It is hard to retrieve the related digital evidence from them, especially in private sectors, which require search warrants or subpoenas. There are still some systematic methodologies that can be conducted concerning the neglected metamorphic digital traces when generic sessions of SNSs are launched [1,3,4]
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