On the Digital Forensics of Social Networking Web-based Applications

Abstract

The popularity and increased adoption of social networking applications have opened Internet users’ doors to conduct different malicious activities. This includes invasion of personal privacy, identity theft, blackmailing, harassment, bullying, fraud, etc. In this context, collecting evidence from social media applications offers invaluable information about users and their activities and interactions with each other. This paper illustrates the forensic procedure used to analyze and retrieve data from a web browser-based Tiktok application as one of the mainstream social networking applications. We mainly considered a scenario of logging into Tiktok from the Google Chrome web browser. The collected digital evidence includes essential information such as chat messages, shared links, uploaded videos, deleted videos, browsing history, etc.