Developing a forensics tool for social media

Abstract

Millions of users around the world utilize social media sites on any given day, spreading information about their activities, whereabouts and thoughts to friends and interested readers. These same messages can be used to construct a digital and physical path that can be extracted for forensic analysis through application programming interfaces provided by each of the social media outlets. While there has been recent work discussing the spread of social media as a means of tracking news and trends in the world at large, little has been done to study a means to analyze the data available through social media using forensic methods. To fill this gap, an application has been created that can retrieve data created by users via social media applications and allow analysis of the same.