Uncovering Mobile Phone Users' Malicious Activities Using Open Source Tools

Smart mobile phones are, nowadays, in wide use and day by day they are transformed into an essential part of everyday life, for business and for entertainment alike. Mobile Networks have been implemented in order to serve these needs. Unfortunately there are many users who want to use the benefits that technology gives to them for malicious and/or illegal actions. In this paper we present and analyze a hypothetical (but realistic) cyber crime investigation scenario. According to this, a user who has wireless internet access using a mobile phone through a University's network facilities, visits sites with pornographic content. A fact that complicates the analysis of the scenario is that the user employs anti-forensics techniques (e.g. data encryption). In this paper we show how to apply to the investigation of this scenario (as well as similar ones) a number of widely available open source forensics analysis tools overcoming the anti-forensics efforts of malicious users. Our goal is to demonstrate their applicability to cyber-crime forensics and their capability to operate in a complementary, to each other, way so that their deployment sheds light to different aspects of the case at hand.