Authors
Gladwel Kubwalo, Tejasvi Bhatia
Abstract
Crimes have been taking place since time in memorial. These crimes are committed differently and that is the reason why they have different names with respect to the factors that determine the offence. It is the core duty of investigators in law enforcement agencies as well as other relevant stake holders to crack down and identify the perpetrators of crimes. It is empirical to mention that the identification of perpetrators of crime is based on the piece of evidence that has been collected. Evidence most of the times is collected at the scene of crime in physical form or from eye witnesses who are people that are present when an offence is being committed. Sometimes evidence is circumstantial depending on how the events surrounding the criminal act occurred. In the modern world, mobile devices are playing a very significant part in our day to day life. These days, mobile devices are being used by individuals of all classes as opposed to a distant past whereby usage of mobile devices was limited only to high class people. The wide usage of mobile phones provides vast availability of evidence. Potential piece of evidence is collected from electronic devices such as mobile phone in digital form. It is advisable that all sorts of evidence that has been scientifically collected and analysed must be treated bearing in mind the set out legal standards so that they can be accepted in court. Forensic investigators are mandated to make sure that they follow proper legal standards when handling forensic evidence. This paper will highlight some forensic evidences and the methodologies on how to collect them from mobile devices. It will also highlight some of the tools that are employed in order to recover data or forensic evidences found in mobile devices. Keywords: Forensic Evidence, Mobile devices, Forensics, Drone Forensics, Data Acquisition, potential evidences, electronic devices, forensic investigator
Introduction
Forensic evidence found in mobile devices is studied under the field of digital forensics. Mobile devices in this case shall mean electronic equipment like mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices, Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and tablet computers (Bennett, 2012). Digital forensics is generally a branch of forensic science that deals with the investigation and recovery of evidence in mobile devices normally that are connected to computer crimes (Daware et al, 2012). This definition collaborates to the explanation that digital forensics also comes under the field of forensic science but its main objective is to see to it that potential evidence which can be traced in digital devices as a result of a computer crime is thoroughly collected, examined and stored according to the set legal standards (Anghel, 2019).
Digital forensics has been defined as a sub-set of forensic science that constitutes the elements of law and computer science to retrieve and examine data that can be acquired from digital devices, different types of networks and storage devices based on the set legal standards and procedures to guarantee admissibility of the evidence in the criminal justice system (Pernik et al, 2016). Mobile forensics on the other hand is a field under digital forensics whose goal is the recovery of potential evidence from mobile devices (Casey, 2009). This branch of mobile forensics has as of late gained much recognition as a result of the increase in the number of people that are in need of the services which are available in mobile devices (Kylämies, 2019). This increase in the number of people in need of mobile device services has created the availability of mobile devices throughout the whole world. Since mobile devices demand connectivity, this has resulted in the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT) technology to supplement the availability of the desired services (Al-Dhaqm et al., 2020). The onus to select a specific forensic methodology when examining evidence is based on the quality and quantity of the evidence in question.
The major aim for a sound forensic examination of digital evidence in question is that the original evidence must not be modified at all costs ((Kylämies, 2019). It is therefore the responsibility of forensic investigators to present evidences to the courts without any modifications. Any modification or alteration made to forensic evidence renders it invalid and therefore not accepted in court (Jain and Chhabra, 2014). This situation has negative repercussions to the justice system as the genuine case may end up being thrown out of court simply because the evidence was mishandled at a certain point in course of the investigations. Mobile devices are defined as portable electronic equipment that has the capability to connect to the internet (Sathiyanarayanan, 2016). Mobile devices are used to commit various types of crimes by ill-minded people. Some examples of nefarious activities that are done using mobile gadgets are defamation, forgery, terrorism, cyber harassment, cyberstalking among others (Yeboah-Boateng and Amanor, 2014).
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| APA Style | Kubwalo, Gladwel, and Tejasvi Bhatia. “Forensic Investigation of the Basic Digital Evidences in Mobile Devices.” Academic Journal of Forensic Science, vol. 5, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 8–20. |
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