Investigating Cybercrimes with Digital Forensics

Abstract

Digital forensics has gained a high degree of attention recently due to the benefits it has to offer in investigating cybercrimes by analyzing and presenting digital evidence. It aims to highlight any correlations related to such crimes. Since digital forensics techniques are capable of providing robust and credible evidence, they have been used in different contexts and are accepted by law enforcement agencies. Social media forensics, a subdomain of digital forensics, has also been widely used to investigate digital crimes and suspicious activities on social media platforms. In addition to the challenges associated with digital forensics, such as anti-forensics, social media forensics also faces several obstacles, such as privacy and big data issues. This research proposes a dynamic methodology that utilizes digital forensics techniques to improve the investigation of cybercrimes committed on social media platforms. The proposed methodology offers a high level of flexibility, including choosing the type of crime, the platform used, and the investigation scenario. As part of the contribution of this research, the proposed methodology is used to detect suspicious activities associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Various techniques and tools are used to evaluate the methodology such as VADER for tweet classification and other tools for collecting and extracting tweets’ information and correlation. The results indicate that the methodology is simple and capable of handling the digital evidence collected, as well as identifying credible relations between the data. The proposed methodology could also be extended in many ways to handle other challenges and limitations associated with digital forensics in general and social media forensics in particular.