Third-party application overview
Third-party applications are an integral part of mobile device investigations. Often, the key artifacts seem to exist within an application. This requires the examiner to understand where application data is stored on the device, how application data is saved for this platform, and which tool best helps uncover the evidence. Manual parsing is often a key factor when examining third-party applications on any smartphone. While some commercial tools, such as Magnet IEF, are known for application parsing support, no tool is perfect and it's virtually impossible for tools to keep up with the frequent updates that are released for each application. Most often, you will realize that the commercial tools parse the most popular applications on the market. For example, when Facebook purchased WhatsApp, Cellebrite, IEF, and Oxygen Forensics started supporting this application. Facebook is extremely popular, but data isn't always extracted or parsed, due...