Social Media Discovery

Social media has become an integral part of daily life. For many people, social media is an easy and intuitive way to express opinions and communicate with friends. From an investigative standpoint, social media presents a wealth of potential evidence for investigators and attorneys alike. TechFusion is uniquely equipped to safely capture and preserve social media and other cloud-based data in an offline format for analysis and protection.TechFusion’s social media discovery and web capture services preserve cloud data in an offline format; essentially “downloading” the online content to a safe offline destination in a forensically sound manner. Once preserved, investigators can analyze the complete content of the account acquired. Preservation has the dual benefit of saving data ahead of any potential modification of the data by the account owner.

TechFusion has the ability to perform both credentialed and public acquisitions. Credentialed acquisitions require the username and password of the account to be acquired. Credentialed acquisitions yield the complete account content, including user posts, user comments, friends or followers, media posts, private messages and other associated content. Credentialed acquisitions can also be performed on any IMAP email account, such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, custom domain and service provider domain.

Public acquisitions only require the URL of the account to be acquired. The amount of data available for acquisition varies widely, as it depends upon the individual user’s privacy settings. Public acquisitions can also be performed on almost any web page, which can include personal blogs, Disqus comments, or news articles. Public acquisitions cannot be performed on email accounts, as there is no public content to capture.

Social media discovery and web capture are critical to cases involving online data. Cloud data is volatile, and can easily be modified or even deleted permanently by the account or site owner. When critical information is stored online, it is important to preserve this data offline as soon as possible ahead of any potential spoliation. There is no way to recover online data once it is deleted.

TechFusion offers the following acquisitions:

• Facebook: Credentialed and Public
• Twitter: Credentialed and Public
• Instagram: Credentialed and Public
• Tumblr: Credentialed and Public
• Youtube: Public only
• Webpage/Blog: Public only
• IMAP Email Account: Credentialed only