Mobile Forensics

The increasing use of Mobile phones by the population as a personal means of communication has made Mobile Phones an important piece of evidence in many legal cases. Now a days, Mobiles are used for e-commerce and the relevance of Mobile Evidence will assume greater importance.

Since Mobile phone is an electronic device there are several aspects of ITA-2000 that apply to the Mobile phone transactions.

These are early days of using of Mobile evidence and there is a very high possibility that an imperfect understanding of the technology by the Police, the Lawyers and the Judges may lead to wrong judicial decisions.

Some key elements of Mobile evidence in view of the importance of the Mobile devices are listed below:

  1. To find out the numbers to which calls have been made from a given mobile with date and time
  2. To find out the numbers from which the calls have been received in a given mobile with date and time
  3. To know the contacts through the Phone book.
  4. To know the details of recent SMS messages received
  5. To know the details of SMS templates
  6. To know the Ring tones and Games stored in the instrument
  7. To know the Pictures and video clips stored in the mobile either on the SIM card or a flash memory card.

iPhone Investigations

Apple iPhone continues to proliferate despite the global recession. Not only can iPhones be used to make phone calls and send and recieve text messages, they can be used to access the Internet, access websites and send and receive emails - amongst a plethora of other functions. Apple's iPhone is essentially a computer that fits into the palm of your hand.

Clearly the proliferation of iPhones causes complexities to those concerned with investigations where a user may have had access to such a device. With the data forensics techniques it is possible to investigate where an iPhone has previously been used and how it has been employed

What data can be retrieved?

Depending on the case objectives of the client, it is possible to retrieve both live and deleted data from an iPhone. The following information can be ascertained:

  • SMS
  • Email
  • Call history & voicemail
  • Photos
  • Calendar events & alarms
  • Internet history & bookmarks
  • Address book contents
  • Typing cache

Additionally the following configuration information may be ascertained:

  • iTunes history
  • Application installation history
  • Application preferences
  • GPS fix
  • Wifi history
  • iPhone configured email account