Forensic artifacts of Facebook´s instant messaging service

This paper highlights the importance of Facebook´s instant messaging service (Facebook Chat) as a potential source of evidence in an investigation. The paper discusses the process of recovering and reconstructing artifacts left by the use of Facebook Chat on a computer´s hard disk. The paper describes experiments in which Facebook Chat conversations in Latin and Arabic character sets were conducted using three major web browsers, and then forensically retrieved. The results highlight how Facebook Chat artifacts of Arabic conversations can be difficult to locate with keyword search functions. The paper describes appropriate steps to overcome these difficulties.