Social Media Forensics

- An Investigative Medium -

Presented By
Aman Talwar - 18030241103
Ankita Yadav - 18030241104
Prachi Balamwar -
Priyanka Shukla - 18030241144
Srishti Dubey - 18030241146
Vasundhara Dwivedi - 18030241149
Apoorva Saraswat -18030241155
Finding Evidence on Online Social Networks (OSN’s)

Information from OSNs falls into four classes-

• User
• Activity
• Network
• Content

Information to conduct background checks on suspects, victims,

and witnesses.

Published contents on social media used as direct evidence to

indicate lifestyle, financial status and relationship preferences of
people.

Metadata maintained by social media sites contribute to aid the

investigations and authenticate the evidences.
Three Basic Stages of Social Media Forensics

Evidence Collection Examination

Identification The files obtained during the
• Involves a thorough Forensic investigators use logical acquisition requires
inspection of crime various methods to collect specific tools for decoding and
scene to locate any electronic evidence. viewing of contents.
Hardware/Software • Manual Documentation For social media forensics
• Identify all social • Open source tools examiners, they provide a
networking accounts (HTTrack). huge bank of social networking
linked to the subject. footprints.
• Commercial tool (X1)
• A search of subject’s • Facebook Artifacts: Activity
• Web Service (Page logs, archives, profile
families, friends and
Freezer) information, places visited.
associated on social
media. • Forensic recovery. • Twitter Artifacts: User info,
tweets posted etc.
OSINT Framework

Various OSINT Tools and kind of data they gather Sub-Phases of OSINT Framework

Source Identification

Data Harvesting

Data Processing & Integration

Data Analysis

Results Delivery
Case Study – Cambridge Analytica & Shakespeare’s Lottery Case

Cambridge Analytica Shakespeare's Lottery

A battle of democracy A murder mystery solved

Up to 87 million users had Alexander Shakespeare, a
their data exposed on day labor in Florida won a
Facebook through an app or lottery of $32 mil, only to be
a quiz which helped in murdered by his advisor. An
psychologically profiling the online community,
users for the benefit of Websleuths traced the IP of
Cambridge Analytica during a fake account created by
US Elections in 2016. Moore to defend herself.

Social Media Forensics - A Powerful Investigation Tool

We are living in an era where each person has 5.54 social media accounts on an average. Today, more and more law
enforcement agencies are using social media as an investigation tool. The increase in social media crimes has also resulted in
the increasing importance of digital forensics for investigations.