The social networking investigation of metadata of forensic artifacts of a typical WeChat session under Windows

Abstract

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.