Preface

It's not a secret that mobile devices have evolved dramatically from being those fateful boxes to extremely advanced brains; their names have also changed from phones to smartphones.

Mobile devices are getting as powerful as personal computers and they can do almost any task that we might need on a daily basis, such as taking and sharing photos and videos, sending and receiving e-mails, checking your bank balance and making bank transactions, social networking, managing tasks and reminders, and so on. Any mobile phone is a huge repository of sensitive data related to its owner and given the pace at which mobile development is progressing, there is no doubt that the need for forensic examination of these devices is on the rise too.

Mobile forensics is a set of scientific methodologies with the goal of extracting digital evidence in a legal context. Extracting digital evidence means recovering, gathering, and analyzing data stored within the internal memory of a mobile phone. Mobile forensics is a continuously evolving science, which involves permanently evolving techniques and presents a real challenge to the forensic community and law enforcement due to the fast and unstoppable changes in technology.

There are a huge number of mobile device models that are in use today and new models are manufactured every five months, and most of them use closed operating systems, thus making the forensic process much more difficult. This book gives the forensic community an in-depth look at mobile forensic techniques by detailing methods of gathering evidence from mobile devices running on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.