Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By : Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov
Book Image

Mobile Forensics ??? Advanced Investigative Strategies

By: Oleg Afonin, Vladimir Katalov

Overview of this book

Investigating digital media is impossible without forensic tools. Dealing with complex forensic problems requires the use of dedicated tools, and even more importantly, the right strategies. In this book, you’ll learn strategies and methods to deal with information stored on smartphones and tablets and see how to put the right tools to work. We begin by helping you understand the concept of mobile devices as a source of valuable evidence. Throughout this book, you will explore strategies and "plays" and decide when to use each technique. We cover important techniques such as seizing techniques to shield the device, and acquisition techniques including physical acquisition (via a USB connection), logical acquisition via data backups, over-the-air acquisition. We also explore cloud analysis, evidence discovery and data analysis, tools for mobile forensics, and tools to help you discover and analyze evidence. By the end of the book, you will have a better understanding of the tools and methods used to deal with the challenges of acquiring, preserving, and extracting evidence stored on smartphones, tablets, and the cloud.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mobile Forensics – Advanced Investigative Strategies
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Accessing destroyed evidence in different mobile platforms


At this time, we have several distinctly different mobile platforms: Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, Windows 8/8.1/10, and BlackBerry 10. To say that these platforms handle deleted data differently is not saying much at all. Android and iOS are poles apart when it comes to handling deleted data and recovering information. Windows Phone 8 is somewhere in between, while Windows RT and the full versions of Windows 8/8.1/10 have their own share of issues.

Apple iOS – impossible

This chapter is easy to write. Recovering data stored in unallocated space in iOS 5 and newer is impossible, even on jailbroken devices. Not even if you send it to Apple, and not if you give them the passcode. Once the data is gone, it's gone. A factory reset erases everything completely and irrecoverably.

A theoretical concept exists allowing you to restore the state of the filesystem to a certain moment in the past. A proof-of-concept tool was...