Social Network Forensics: Digital Forensics for Social Media - Evidence Extraction Tool Capabilities

This research evaluates evidence extraction tools in a systematic and forensically sound manner and based on the findings of the literature review in this research, to measure the capability of extracting evidence from SNSs in different test scenarios. The tools evaluated in this research, while identifying their strengths and weaknesses, can dramatically improve the efficiency of a knowledgeable forensic examiner. The research findings presented may be valuable for law enforcement agents and digital forensic investigators in identifying current issues and limitations of the tools, and for software vendors to recognise the limitations of the tools, so that they can improve the tools for better extraction capability. It is hoped that the research findings may contribute to the future development of a social network artefact extraction tool, or to the enhancement of existing tools.