Digital Forensic Investigation of Cyberstalking and Social Media Harassment using Network Forensic Analysis

Abstract

Cyber harassment committed on social media are becoming more difficult for forensic investigators to gather evidence by changing the default location of important system files and folders on the victim’s machine. Social media has made life easy for people and organizations because of the numerous advantages it has but the fact from evidence shows that these technologies could be taken over and utilized to the advantage of criminals to commit a wide scale of havoc and crimes on the cyber world, Crimes committed over the internet are called cybercrime as cyber related criminal attacks become more predominant in today’s technologically driven society. Hence the need for and use of digital evidence in courts is inevitable. Digital forensics is the science of identifying, extracting, analyzing and presenting the digital evidence that has been stored in the digital devices there by making it easy for perpetrators of such crimes to be accountable and successfully prosecuting them. The main aim of this work is to provide a digital forensic investigation in cyber-stalking and social media harassment. In order to achieve the intended aim three objectives have been formulated thus to design digital forensic model that will mitigate the rapid increase of harassment on social media and security challenges, compare the proposed digital forensic model to in investigation. From our result that live-box analysis, alongside dead-box analysis gave us gave five (5) sufficient evidences will enable investigators bypass the issue of false flag, save time and apprehend the criminal.