Social media risks from forensic point of view

Abstract

In the age of Facebook children are better computer or mobile phone users than their parents; we do not know any teenagers who do not have a social media profile, an email or an instant messenger account. It became the part of their everyday life; however they do not care and even do not know much about the other side of the social life. The Internet gives freedom for everyone, but in this big freedom we forget to teach our children and ourselves how to handle and protect sensitive information properly. In this article we focus on the risk of cyber crime against a single user who is not sufficiently careful to protect his or her information, we are going to show the way in which a forensic expert or even a cyber criminal can use internet activity reconstruction tools. We undertook this research using a real criminal investigation example, find out the kind of information that has been collected and stored about a user by a client computer and give some useful advices how to protect ourselves against cyber criminals.