An Examination of the Techniques and Implications of the Crowd-Sourced Collection of Forensic Data

Social-web giants - like 4chan.org, reddit.com, andyoutube.com - are quickly becoming the driving force behind content generation on the web. Because these sites have incredibly large user-bases and content is frequently cross-posted between social-sites, trending topics are often viewed by hundreds of millions of Internet users. The exposure of this content to the digital-mob has had numerous, technically significant consequences - including the emergence of successful, ad-hoc forensic investigations conducted by amateurs online. In this paper, we will present a simple process model that characterizes crowd-sourced digital forensic investigations. Additionally, we will explore the implications of the phenomenon of username reuse, and discuss its role in the context of both formal and informal digital forensics. Finally, we will provide a cost-effective methodology for utilizing crowd-sourcing services to augment the information discovery phase of a formal digital forensic investigation.