Mobile Phone & Computer Forensics

Since the 1980s, computers have had increasing roles in all aspects of human life—including an involvement in criminal acts. While the task of supporting as many different devices and apps as possible is a challenge to the manpower of any R&D department, dealing with security features in order to be able to get any data at all from mobile devices is a constant cat-and-mouse game between mobile device manufacturers and forensic toolkit manufacturers, pushing the development of technologies to an unprecedented high level.
Computer forensics is a relatively new discipline combining elements of law and computer science to collect and analyse data from mobile device forensics computer systems, networks, wireless communications and storage devices in a way that is admissible as evidence in a courtroom.

Whether your get your cell service from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile or another provider, your cell phone service provider keeps records of who you call, when you called them, where you went (thanks to the GPS location on your phone), who you texted, and when you texted.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an abstract to assist the reader in understanding that digital forensics is a forensic science and to address confusion about the dual nature of the application of digital forensics techniques as both a forensic science and as an investigatory tool.
Parties in litigation seeking to prove wrongdoing often find important evidence, clues and traces by analysing activities stored on cell phones and smart devices, including contacts and their creation dates as well as when and how often certain phone numbers were called.

Mobile operating systems: Unlike personal computers where Windows has dominated the market for years, mobile devices widely use more operating systems, including Apple's iOS , Google's Android , RIM's BlackBerry OS, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, HP's webOS, Nokia's Symbian OS, and many others.
UFED Cloud Analyzer provides forensic practitioners with instant extraction, preservation and analysis of private social media accounts — Facebook, Twitter, Kik, Instagram — file storage and other cloud-based account content that can help speed investigations.

This includes deleted data, call history, contacts, text messages, multimedia messages, photos, videos, recordings, calendar items, reminders, notes, data files, passwords, and data from apps such as Skype, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, Signal, WeChat and many others.
During the inquiry into a given crime involving mobile technology, the individuals in charge of the mobile forensic process need to acquire every piece of information that may help them later - for instance, device's passwords, pattern locks or PIN codes.

Nearly every crime involves digital media and the size and number of devices continues to increase, however many local and state law enforcement agencies budgets are not keeping up. This work builds on a previous S&T effort by the same name which ended in 2016 and helps solve this problem by building law enforcement-focused solutions using free and open-source software.
Resulting image is fairly technical—in binary format—and it requires a person having the technical education to analyze it. Furthermore, the examiner comes into possession of an abundant amount of data, since deleted data can be recovered, and, on top of that, the entire process is inexpensive.