Abstract:
The rapid revolution in technology has made the interaction among people easier through social media. Social media facilitates communication and provides easy way of reaching out to people. It has also given the business people novel ways to promote their business products and services. Therefore, now social media usage is not limited to only personal matters or fun but is also used for business advertising and selling purposes. It has also become an important platform for staying informed about our important activities like bank transactions, utility bill payments and car services reminders.
The increased use and need of social media has raised the risks associated with it such as risk of disclosure of personal details which, if exploited, can lead to privacy issues and also contribute to major problems. At the same time the anonymous nature of the social media provides a platform for conducting crimes such as blackmailing, identity impersonation, social bullying, and financial fraud. On the other hand, the increase in storage space with advancement in technology has made the digital forensic investigation a time consuming and difficult task [49]. Hence, it is essential to study social media from a forensic investigation point of view and to have adequate knowledge of the artifact locations of different frequently used social media applications so that this pre-hand information may be helpful in resolving criminal cases faster.
In this research, we have investigated the remnants of Facebook, Viber, Twitter and Skype. The research work is carried out for Windows 10 and Window 8.1. The potential locations are examined and analyzed to find artifact locations and their details. Window Registry was also taken into consideration while looking for the remnants moreover we have also recovered the items from unallocated space, which also includes those that were permanently deleted from Windows. We have also highlighted some of the artifacts’ location changes found in the three operating systems such as Window 10 initial release (Technical Preview), Window 10 updated version (education edition Version 1507 (build 10.0.10240), and Version 1607 (build 10.0.14393),) and Window 8.1.
