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

Chapter 6. iOS Logical and Cloud Acquisition

In this chapter, we'll refer to logical acquisition in the sense of acquiring and analyzing iTunes backups. Every time an iPhone user syncs their device with a PC (Windows or macOS X), iTunes creates a local copy of all user data stored in the device (unless the user opts for cloud backups, which will be covered in the next chapter). While it is arguable whether automated backups with no user intervention are a good thing or a bad thing, unless a cloud option is selected, users end up having backup copies of their device contents on every computer they sync with.

As a result, the chance of encountering a local copy of an iPhone on the user's PC is not insignificant. By default, iTunes stores offline backups in the following folders on the user's computer:

  • macOS X: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

  • Windows XP: Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSyncBackup

  • Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8, and 8.1...