What is Cell Phone Forensics?
Look around, wherever you are (that is if you can tear yourself away, for a moment, from the alluring siren song of your own smart phone) and you are bound to see, virtually, everyone with their necks craned, staring down, intently, entranced by their phones: reading text messages, sharing photos, writing notes, surfing the web, interacting on social media, shopping or engaging in an almost unlimited array of traceable activities. This makes cell phones – which are capable of storing a tremendous cache of personal, and, often, intensely intimate, classified information – indispensable for retrieval of incriminating, court-admissible data. In the digital age, when every byte of data counts, those omnipresent mobile devices are an invaluable tool when it comes to high tech investigation.
Cell phone forensic experts specialize in the forensic retrieval of data from cell phones and other mobile devices, in an appropriate manner, which preserves the evidence, under forensically-sanctioned conditions ensuring that it will be admissible in a court of law.
Some of the types of data which may be retrieved and examined during a cell phone forensic investigation – even after being deleted, include the following:
- Call times, dialed and received calls and call durations
- Text messages recover of SMS
- Contact names and phone numbers
- Address book entries, residential addresses and email addresses
- Photos and graphics
- Videos
