Industry 4.0 and Web 2.0 advances have made social networking acceptable and common place in many workplaces. These social networks are easy to operate; users on social networks can freely share knowledge, create profiles, and make users active participants. Social network accounts contain personal and private information; the account holders are placed at risk of different risks to get hacked [1]. Furthermore, social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have been vulnerable to various online attacks. The attack may occur outside or within the system/on the network. An assault on a device outside of the network generally includes denial of service (DoS), and an attack on the internal component includes cookie data retrieval. Social networking is known to be at risk of this kind of assault. A team of creative people has focused on the latest investigation method, which is social network forensics. Proof gathered from social media plays a critical role in a police investigation’s crucial role (See Fig. 2).
Similarly, social media is excellent for gathering evidence about possible perpetrators and witnesses [2]. Furthermore, integrating social network investigation with digital forensics in reaching a new and complex subgroup of data sources such as demographics, photos, places, and messages would provide investigators with expanded data access. The combination of this network information with the metadata has a tremendous investigative ability. The metadata may be used to support social networking information, as well. For these reasons, it can be assumed that social network analysis is emerging as a new direction in digital forensics [3].
For the emergence of social media applications on many devices, these technologies have new potential sources of visual proof. In other terms, extensive analysis, including the conversation records and digital artifacts such as photographs, keys, tweets, and friends, will remain as possible digital forensic evidence. Social network forensics is key to us in our case investigation, making this one of the essential modern forensic concepts we see now [4]. Similar research investigated smartphones, like Androids, iPhones, and Blackberries, as well it concluded that digital artifacts, including timestamps, passwords, URLs, and pictures, could be extracted from text files. Based on the previous research, social network analysis may be an effective method to follow digital data distribution and very successful in uncovering and collecting digital evidence. Social network forensics often have three features: searching in reverse, weakening geographic searches, understanding how and when people use location, and metadata collection [5]. The first benefit of Google Image Searching is done in a window that provides the results in a tab. It also integrates six separate forensic charts to get various balances on social media. Lastly, it works for embedded images and presents all the metadata in whole rather than truncated form. Using these functionalities, investigators may have more access to relevant material. Social network forensics has been a significant theme in the digital investigation community.
While most digital forensics techniques are geared to finding proof on the target computer, more advanced options for researching unfamiliar and challenging settings like big data are mostly missing; these tools, such as exploring sources, are standard [6]. Because of this, the software’s diversity, the bulk of forensic software cannot detect irregularities automatically even without human supervision. One of the more urgent priorities is to develop software and strategies to see the bulk of data and search for digital clues. Of course, unfortunately, the difficult challenge of using these methods and procedures and the significant technical criteria are not met with uniform standards.
As has been said, digital forensics is a requirement for investigations that are often closely interwoven with cybersquatter aspects. The prevalence of cybercrimes and fraudulent activity in modern society creates an economic and personal risk for all in society. Thus, emerging technology in the investigative area can emphasize heterogeneity, protect anonymity, and have scalability.
References:
- Wazid, M., Katal, A., Goudar, R. H., & Rao, S. (2013, April). Hacktivism trends, digital forensic tools and challenges: A survey. In 2013 IEEE Conference on Information & Communication Technologies (pp. 138-144). IEEE.
- Rocha, A., Scheirer, W. J., Forstall, C. W., Cavalcante, T., Theophilo, A., Shen, B., … & Stamatatos, E. (2016). Authorship attribution for social media forensics. IEEE transactions on information forensics and security, 12(1), 5-33.
- Baggili, I., & Breitinger, F. (2015, March). Data sources for advancing cyber forensics: what the social world has to offer. In 2015 AAAI Spring Symposium Series.
- Al Mutawa, N., Baggili, I., & Marrington, A. (2012). Forensic analysis of social networking applications on mobile devices. Digital investigation, 9, S24-S33.