Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) are making progress day by day, driven by the relentless need to utilize them for everything from leisure to business. This inevitable trend has dramatically changed contemporary digital behavior in all aspects. Undoubtedly, digital fingerprints will be at some point unwarily left on crime scenes creating digital information security incidents. On the other hand, corporates in the private sector or governments are on the edge of being exploited in terms of confidential digital information leakages. Some digital fingerprinting is volatile by its nature. Alternatively, once the power of computing devices is no longer sustainable, these digital traces could disappear forever. Due to the pervasive usage of Google Calendar and Safari browser among network communities, digital fingerprinting could be disclosed if forensics is carried out in a sound manner, which could be admitted in a court of law as probative evidences concerning certain cybercrime incidents.
Digital forensics-related investigations have been a relative competitive research area by the computer specialists or law enforcement agency officers to confirm or refuse the assumptions with respect to the cybercrime scenes. WeChat is one of the most popular instant messaging application programs in contemporary age. While applying WeChat, there is precious information deposited in the computing devices that could be supportive evidences in a court of law. Hence, this research is focusing on the application of WeChat on the desktop PC under Windows 7 by means of the acquisition of volatile digital evidences in order to provide supporting information for some cybercrime cases. This paper provides generic investigation methods conducting forensic sound analysis on WeChat from the aspect of data volatility of the computing devices. By means of the proposed methodologies, the digital forensics specialists should be able to gather critical digital traces to confirm the previous actions of a WeChat user or even to reconstruct the crime scene to prove the suspect is guilty or innocent in a court of law.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.