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 3. Acquisition – Approaching Android Devices

Approximately, 82% of mobile devices (Q1, 2016) run the Android OS. The total number of active Android devices is about 1.4 billion (although not all of these are Google devices).

Similar to iOS, the data is not stored exclusively on mobile devices. In Android 6, Google officially introduced a cloud backup option, allowing users to maintain limited automatic backups for Android devices on Google Drive. Learning what Google knows about the user can be essential for an investigation.

An excellent resource with lots of detailed (but not too technical) information exists to help forensic experts get a better understanding of Android forensics. The Free Android Forensics blog at http://freeandroidforensics.blogspot.com offers excellent insight into the Android platform, imaging tools, and techniques. The blog mostly talks about using free forensic tools and acquisition techniques, which in our opinion can limit the available acquisition options...