As is known to us all, data is critical for legal investigations nowadays. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile technology, most digital data can be found on mobile devices since almost everyone uses a mobile device today, be it a smartphone, tablet, or even wearable device.
Mobile devices are a goldmine of data. These small-sized gadgets amass huge amounts of qualitative and quantitative data that can be helpful in investigations. That’s why mobile forensics is becoming important for court proceedings and civil or criminal investigations.
In this case, with the assistance of the right mobile forensic tools, implementing mobile forensics becomes easier. By using these tools, crime investigators can access, extract and analyze data from mobile devices. These tools are designed to empower law-enforcement organizations for conducting efficient investigations, speeding up operations, and ensuring quality digital evidence.
Moving ahead in today’s article, we’ll learn why to use mobile forensic tools.
Significance of Using Mobile Forensic Tools Nowadays
Mobile forensic tools are very helpful to investigators. There are many ways in which these tools can improve your operations and achieve better results in detecting, investigating, and prosecuting crimes.
Among all its benefits, below 2 are vital to enlighten your mind in a flash.
Helps Crack Cases Involving Advanced Tech
As technology is advancing and the world is becoming wireless, criminals are becoming more sophisticated in committing crimes.
The use of information systems is no longer limited to IT professionals and hackers. It’s now being widely used by malicious entities like extortionists, drug dealers, and illegal gamblers.
For example, they use cryptocurrencies for illegal and disreputable things, such as money laundering, fraud, smuggling, and cybercrime. Moreover, the web brings a sense of anonymity to users and lures organized crimes, while most of these take place on smartphones. Identity theft, illegal electronic surveillance, pornography, and stealing intellectual theft are some other examples of crimes committed every day on mobile devices.
So, cutting-edge techniques in digital forensics, especially mobile forensics, are always required to deal with such high-tech crimes effectively and scientifically.
There are mobile forensic toolkits using which you can successfully investigate even the most complicated crimes committed using highly-advanced technologies, like cryptocurrency, VR, AR, even the most trending metaverse technology, etc.
Establishes You as a Reputed and Reliable Law Enforcement Agency
Upgrading equipment boosts up the investigation process by tracking people in real-time rather than hours. This helps solve cases faster and more efficiently. This, in turn, brings you more reputation and reliability from the public and superiors.
It also shows that you’re taking necessary and reasonable technological steps to mitigate the risks involved in mobile forensics.
For these reasons, advanced mobile forensic tools are a must-have piece of equipment for law enforcement agencies.
These tools save costs to both law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. In addition, they make it easier to collect and present all digital evidence in court to prosecute criminals and solve cases faster, which simultaneously increases the ratio of case cracking.
So, you become a citizen-friendly law enforcement agency for the public.
Benefits on Implementing Mobile Forensics
For each of the following, we will explain how these tools help ease things when implementing mobile forensics.
Help Track Criminals and Victims Faster
Time runs fast against law enforcement. In cases like kidnapping or runaway situations, every second pushes the victim into more danger.
Earlier, police or investigators would rely on the information provided by friends, family, eyewitnesses, and credit card tracking. While all of the above information is helpful, GPS data on smartphones can help track both victim and criminal faster.
Though when it’s time permitted, taking mobile phone evidence to a digital forensic lab for extracting data and making it accessible to investigators could better testify to its reliability and credibility, using mobile forensic tools, you can easily fetch GPS information in just a few minutes without much extra work.
Gather Crucial Evidence from Cell Phones
Besides, in actual mobile forensic investigation, there are various types of data stored on mobile devices. However, it may not be possible to access special hidden files or advanced forms of data from smartphones using manual processes or old techniques.
Especially, modern mobile devices are capable of holding a large amount of data in different formats, which means it’ll be difficult to determine which format will aid your investigation.
The most common formats are images, call logs, contacts, text messages, audio, videos, app data, emails, and much more, though not to mention lots of hidden files or unique data files that may not be discovered using standard extraction processes.Or, the process can be laborious and time-intensive, causing unnecessary delays and confusion.
As the variety of data in mobile devices is expanding, investigators have to put in extra efforts to extract and analyze required information. Moreover, with manual processes, there’s a risk of assessing inaccurate content and/or not being able to find pertinent data for cracking the case.
Even the most known manual processes may not help with this.
Helps Reimagine the Crime Scene
When a criminal activity takes place in a large public area, people capture videos and photos. For instance, for investigating many high-profile bombing cases, investigators used cell phone images and videos to understand what and how it happened.
They check mobile data for unusual people, activities, and other things at the crime scene.
In this case, mobile forensic tools help retrieve accurate data to help investigators act faster and efficiently, which is going to make them better reimagine the crime scene and find valuable clues.
Help Acquire and Preserve Useful Digital Evidence in Mobile Devices
Modern criminal investigations require modern forensic tools to deal with a swamp of data formats since valuable clues could be hidden deeply and mysteriously in unforeseen ways. Moreover, there is a risk of losing data while trying to retrieve it.
Fortunately, mobile forensic tools can help unlock, retrieve and analyze all kinds of data on phones, whether it’s an iPhone or an Android device, and almost all popular mobile devices while preserving digital evidence.
Take Mobile forensic tools, like SPF Pro from SalvationDATA for instance, it’s capable of security mechanisms to help retrieve data without losing any of it. Meanwhile, It also provides deeper encryption of SIM card PINs and PUKs to analyze the suspect’s persona for overall information.
How to Choose Mobile Forensic Tools
When it comes to assessing mobile device forensic tools, the following factors should be under consideration.
Reliability
Investigations are highly sensitive matters. A little mistake or wrong information can result in big and costly mistakes. So, you need reliable mobile forensic tools that facilitates efficient extraction, analysis, recovery and preservation of data. A good tool should support simultaneous data extraction and recovery on multiple devices.
As mentioned above, investigators need efficient data quickly and reliably.
SPF Pro supports up to 8 mobile devices and helps gather useful and accurate digital evidence for investigation. Moreover, it can intelligently recommend the right extraction solutions according to the model and brand of the device.
Usability
During mobile forensics, you may have to deal with a lot of different smartphone brands and models. With accelerating mobile technology, smartphone manufacturers are introducing new models regularly. Also, a lot of new mobile device brands have come into existence over the past few years. It’s not viable to use a different tool for each brand or model.
So, you need a mobile forensic tool that works with all smartphone brands and models.
Fortunately, there are some tools that fully support many phone brands and models. For example, SalvationDATA’s SPF Pro supports all mobile device operating systems including Android, iOS, Windows, Palm, BADA, Ubuntu, Blackberry, Symbian, and many more.
Furthermore, It especially works well with Chinese phones like Oppo, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc via newbies friendly one-click functionality to easily perform data extraction and imaging to complete your analysis of the suspects.
Functionality
To convey a major premise in mobile forensics, mobile apps store most data in SQLite databases. So, a lot of information about suspects exists in these databases while they are highly protected to maintain user privacy, which makes it difficult to extract useful data from a variety of apps.
In this case, reliable mobile forensic tools would mavarously help solve the problem since most of them are capable of accessing app databases while still preserving sensitive user details. For example, toolkits like SPF Pro can decode databases of hundreds of popular apps and display their data in a structured manner easily.
Accuracy
The success of any investigation largely depends on the accuracy of evidence. Under advanced Big Data Technology Forensics, a featured mobile forensic tool would be much more qualified to be employed, since it would help gather, extract and analyze digital data speedily and accurately.
Conclusion
Modern mobile devices have become ubiquitous in our lives and are evolving into full-fledged computing platforms. So, these devices are now crucial as evidentiary devices in criminal and civil investigations. As mentioned above, mobile devices, especially smartphones, yield an abundance of miscellaneous data that can help investigators a lot. However, even the best-known manual processes may not help uncover this data.
Fortunately, mobile forensic tools solve this problem up to a great extent. These advanced tools leverage high-end technology like big data and artificial intelligence to reveal all data on these devices in an efficient forensically sound manner.
That’s why mobile forensic tools are important in cracking cases of any kind.
