Getting information from a locked phone is not a simple task. In the digital era, you can avail most of the crucial information from smartphones. From text messages, social media posts to application usage and geological information, a smartphone stores everything.
Generally, most of this data is encrypted to protect the user’s privacy. Plus, the data is mostly used by applications to provide users with better quality service. Besides that, the user’s mobile data remains safe.
However, if the information is necessary for a criminal investigation or is crucial evidence, police or government agencies need to extract the data. It’s the time when mobile forensics investigations take place.
So, let’s learn more about the same!
Generally, when a device is involved in a criminal offense, forensic analysts use different types of data acquisitions to take out information. The simplest acquisition method is “Manual Acquisition,” which includes searching through the phone.
In case the phone is locked, they need to use a Digital Forensics Tool to access the data. The tool works for both iOS and android and helps in extracting locked as well as encrypted information.
Once the data is extracted, it is transferred to the PC safely. It helps in facilitating further investigation.
Generally, mobile devices have huge databases. Searching through each data to find one is a daunting task. And if the information is hidden, it could get more exhausting. Therefore, investigators use “file system acquisition.” It helps them gain access to all the hidden and root files from the data. However, this doesn’t help in recovering deleted files.
The data in a mobile device is never permanently deleted. Typically, the device’s flash memory doesn’t delete the file until it requires space for something new. Instead, it “Deindexes” the data, i.e., forgetting what the information is and where it is stored.
If the device is not overwritten, you can use software to recover the deleted information. However, it is not very easy. You need extremely powerful tools to get the data. Plus, not every type of file can be recovered.
Usually, it depends on the device the forensic analyst is working on. Nevertheless, the available files that are more likely to be recovered are:
It is also possible to recover deleted WhatsApp messages, conditioned that they are not encrypted.
Not always! To access the encrypted messages, you need to use an encryption key which is never easy to find. However, companies are working to come up with a solution for this.
But in a few cases, some phones have backdoors built. It allows the professionals to access the information or guess the password. Once the password is recovered, it becomes accessible to some extent.
Besides that, sometimes analysts use backups to recover the required data. Even so, encrypted data is hard to get.
The Bottom Line,
The mobile data is generally safe and not necessarily required unless it is for police investigation or evidence. And only digital forensic analysts can remove the data and for legal purposes only.
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