- What surprises have you encountered specific to your research question?
- Have you discovered something new not yet expounded on based on bringing together the disparate sources on the topic?
I feel like the topic that I chose is pretty
straightforward. I haven’t really had
too many surprises while doing my research.
There has been somethings that I hadn’t really considered such as the
challenge of the speed of technology.
This includes how fast software and hardware changes. With technology always changing,
investigative teams have a hard time keeping up with the changes, and are
having to constantly learn and find new tools for jailbreaking devices,
decrypting files, and cracking passwords.
This is definitely a challenge of digital forensics, and depending on
how locked down ones social media profile is, a challenge in social media forensics
as well, as there is, not surprisingly, a lot of crossover in the challenges of
social media forensics and digital forensics.
I guess another surprise, that really isn’t a surprise, but
something that I had not really considered is that social media forensics can
easily place you in a crime scene or prove that you were not at a crime scene
by way of geo-locaters. A lot of people
have this option turned-on, on their social media accounts for ease of posting
statuses, finding friends nearby, or connecting with other laps. The information provided by these
geo-location settings can tell a lot about where a person was at a
particular
time, and can help to prove or disprove their involvement in a crime.
One other thing that I hadn’t really considered until
someone had brought it up in class is the possibility of someone trying to
create fake social media accounts portraying someone else, and misrepresenting
that person negatively. While this can
definitely happen and can present its own unique challenges, it is fairly
simple for an investigator can tell whether the account is a fake if they look
at the IP address where the account is being logged into. Most users are not sophisticated enough to
hide their digital tracks.
