What Goes Into Mobile Device Forensics

E-discovery services

As our culture becomes more and more heavily invested in technology and the Internet, digital forensics companies have become that much more important to securing our personal information, our reputations, and identities.

Recently, the field of digital forensic analysis have begun evolving their tools to investigate mobile devices. Mobile devices are used commonly as evidence because forensic experts can retrieve incriminating evidence such as deleted texts and voicemails using a “flash” or “twister” box.

Digital forensics companies investigate mobile phones in three phases: seizure, acquisition and analysis. First, digital forensics companies seize the phone, so as to preserve the evidence. This keeps the perpetrator from dismantling and destroying the phone, which would severely hinder digital forensics companies’ progress. Secondly, the acquisition phase refers to a retrieval of materials and data from the phone. Thirdly, is the examination and analysis, which finds the specific evidence amongst the mobile device’s data.

The amount of data types that can be found on mobile devices increases as technology’s complexities march forward. Now, digital forensic companies can pull evidence from a number of sources on the device, including handset memory, SIM card, and attached memory cards, like an SD card.

Such evidence that digital forensics companies pull off phones include the recovery of SMS and MMS messaging, call logs, contact lists, web browsing history, Wireless network settings, geolocation information that includes geotags contained within the metadata of an image, e-mail, social networking service posts and contacts, and other information that could be retained on apps.

The extraction of such evidence has been a big help to law enforcement. Digital forensic investigators used such information as the GPS/location tracking via cell site logs to track down Thomas Onofri’s kidnappers in 2006. What’s more, digital forensics companies are of help to other fields apart from law enforcement, such as military intelligence, corporate investigations, private investigations, and criminal and civil defense.

If you have any questions about the processes that computer forensics services use to pull mobile phone evidence, feel free to ask in the comments! Find more on this here.