Preface

The exponential growth of mobile devices has revolutionized many aspects of our lives. In what is called as the post-PC era, smartphones are engulfing desktop computers with their enhanced functionality and improved storage capacity. This rapid transformation has led to increased usage of mobile handsets across all the sectors.

Despite their small size, smartphones are capable of performing many tasks: sending private messages and confidential e-mails, taking photos and videos, making online purchases, viewing our salary slips, completing banking transactions, accessing social networking sites, managing business tasks, and more. Hence, a mobile device is now a huge repository of sensitive data that can provide a wealth of information about its owner. This has in turn led to the evolution of Mobile Device Forensics, a branch of digital forensics that deals with retrieving data from a mobile device. Today, there is huge demand for specialized forensic experts, especially given the fact that the data retrieved from a mobile device is court admissible.

Mobile forensics is all about utilizing scientific methodologies to recover data stored within a mobile phone for legal purposes. Unlike traditional computer forensics, mobile forensics has limitations in obtaining evidence due to rapid changes in the technology and the fast-paced evolution of mobile software. With different operating systems and with a wide range of models being released into the market, mobile forensics has expanded over the last few years. Specialized forensic techniques and skills are required in order to extract data under different conditions.

This book takes you through the challenges involved in mobile forensics and practically explains detailed methods of collecting evidence from different mobile devices with iOS, Android, and Windows mobile operating systems.

This book is organized in a manner that allows you to focus independently on chapters that are specific to your required platform.