Book Image

iOS Forensics for Investigators

By : Gianluca Tiepolo
5 (1)
Book Image

iOS Forensics for Investigators

5 (1)
By: Gianluca Tiepolo

Overview of this book

Professionals working in the mobile forensics industry will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to learning how to extract and analyze all available data from an iOS device. This book is a comprehensive, how-to guide that leads investigators through the process of collecting mobile devices and preserving, extracting, and analyzing data, as well as building a report. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book starts by covering the fundamentals of mobile forensics and how to overcome challenges in extracting data from iOS devices. Once you've walked through the basics of iOS, you’ll learn how to use commercial tools to extract and process data and manually search for artifacts stored in database files. Next, you'll find out the correct workflows for handling iOS devices and understand how to extract valuable information to track device usage. You’ll also get to grips with analyzing key artifacts, such as browser history, the pattern of life data, location data, and social network forensics. By the end of this book, you'll be able to establish a proper workflow for handling iOS devices, extracting all available data, and analyzing it to gather precious insights that can be reported as prosecutable evidence.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Data Acquisition from iOS Devices
4
Section 2 – iOS Data Analysis
14
Section 3 – Reporting

Introducing timelines

Timeline analysis is used extensively in forensic investigations that mainly involve collecting and analyzing large volumes of data within a particular timeframe. This is a great technique to determine what activity occurred on a system at a certain time and allows examiners to make inferences easily.

A timeline is essentially a list of events displayed in a particular order, usually chronologically. Timelines can be displayed as lists, tables, charts, or graphs.

By analyzing the timeline, a forensic analyst can easily find out when a particular event or incident happened. Timelining also helps figure out any other event that took place during the same time interval, and how these events are interconnected to one another.

Most forensic tools provide the examiner with the option of automatically generating a timeline of events that occurred during a specific timeframe. The timeline's data can then be exported as a CSV document and used to generate...