Abstract
Facebook has changed the way people leave and communicate with each other. Remnants of Facebook activities and personal information are serious privacy and security concerns. The Facebook usage information includes traces of criminal activities such as child abuse, cyber bullying, political-related posts, and other offensive activities. The personal information includes usernames, passwords, email address, telephone number, etc. In this paper, we use memory forensics to extract the data remnants from the use of Facebook via a web browser on Windows operating systems machine. The results of our experiment demonstrate that we can acquire both personal data as well as Facebook usage activities data from the memory of the device. In addition, we show that memory forensics helps the forensics investigators to identify the offenders and report the actions to the law enforcement officials. For this experiment, we use various memory forensics acquisition and analysis software. For the acquisition part, we use a free software called Magnet Ram capture. This is an easy to use and captures the memory of the device. For the analysis part, we Bulk Extractor, which is also a free software. This tool has several scanners each scanner analyzes specific Facebook activity such email extraction, fore example. To carry out the experiment, we created several anonymous Facebook accounts to hide the identity of the researchers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Umair, A., Nanda, P., He, X.: Online social network information forensics: a survey on use of various tools and determining how cautious Facebook users are? In: Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS.2017.364, pp. 1139–1144 (2017)
Yusoff, M.N., Dehghantanha, A., Mahmod, R.: Forensic investigation of social media and instant messaging services in firefox OS: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Telegram, OpenWapp, and line as case studies. In book: Contemporary Digital Forensic Investigations of Cloud and Mobile Applications, pp. 41–62. Elsevier, (2016)
Memoryze: memory analysis tool from Fireeye: Redline. https://www.fireeye.com/services/freeware/redline.html
Ali, S., Islam, N., Rauf, A., Din, I.U., Guizani, M., Rodrigues, J.P.C.: Privacy and Security Issues in Online Social Networks. Fut. Internet 10(12), 1–12 (2018)
Krishnamurthy, B.: Privacy and social media networks: can colorless green ideas sleep furiously. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/64346/dwork.pdf
Buccafurri, F., Lax, G., Nicolazzo, S., Nocera, A.: Comparing Twitter and Facebook user behavior: privacy and other aspects. Comput. Hum. Behav. 52, 87–95 (2015)
Fire, M., Kagan, D., Elishar, A., Elovici, Y.: Social privacy protector-protecting users’ privacy in social networks (2012)
Majeed, A., Saleem, S.: Forensics analysis of social media apps in windows 10. NUST J. Eng. Sci. 10(1), 37–45 (2017)
Singh, A., Sharma, P., Sharma, S.: A novel memory forensics technique for windows 10. J. Netw. Inform. Sec. 4(2), 1–10 (2016)
Yang, T.Y., Dehghantanha, A., Choo, K.K., Muda, Z.: Windows instant messaging app forensics: Facebook and skype as case studies. PLoS One 11(3), 1–29 (2016)
Bachler, M.: An analysis of smartphones using open source tools versus the proprietary tool cellebrite UFED touch. https://www.marshall.edu/forensics/files/BACHLER_MARCIE_Research-Paper_Aug-5.pdf
Venkateswara, R.V., Chakravarthy, A.S.N.: Survey on android forensic tools and methodologies. Int. J. Comp. Appl. 154(8) (2016)
Junaid, M., Tewari, J.P., Kumar, R., Vaish, A.: Proposed methodology for smart phone forensic tool. Asian J. Comp. Sci. Technol. 4(2), 1–5 (2015)
Chang, M.S.: Digital forensic investigation of Facebook on windows 10. Int. J. Innov. Sci. Eng. Technol. 3(9), 1–7 (2016)
Chang, M.S., Yen, C.P.: Facebook social network forensics on windows 10. Int. J. Innov. Sci. Eng. Technol. 3(9), 55–60 (2016)
VMware Workstation Player 15. https://www.vmware.com
Magnet RAM Capture: Acquiring Memory with Magnet RAM Capture. https://www.magnetforensics.com/blog/acquiring-memory-with-magnet-ram-capture/
Garfinkel, S.L.: Digital media triage with bulk data analysis and bulk extractor. Comp. Sec. 32, 56–72 (2013)
Facebook privacy settings. https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/how-to-manage-your-privacy-settings-on-social-media
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ghafarian, A., Keskin, D. (2022). Using Memory Forensics to Investigate Security and Privacy of Facebook. In: Arai, K. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 508. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10467-1_35
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10467-1_35
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10466-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10467-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)