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

Approaching physical acquisition


When approaching a device, you may want to consider the following:

  • Some manufacturers ship their devices with fully or partially unlocked bootloaders. Imaging such devices usually presents no problem (unless data is encrypted).

  • Some manufacturers ship their devices with locked bootloaders, officially allowing users to unlock them (for example, Samsung, Motorola, SONY, Nexus devices, and many others). If the user unlocked the bootloader, there is a high probability of successful imaging (unless an anti-forensic technique was employed).

  • In many cases, manufacturers and/or carriers restrict bootloader unlocks. In some cases, it is possible to bypass these restrictions in some models (the chipset and manufacturer of the device are important). Some chipset makers and device OEMs have backdoors (used for service-level access), while some can be exploited to bypass bootloader lock and boot into a custom recovery (which does not necessarily mean that you can permanently...