Investigating Privacy and Security of LinkedIn Via Forensics Analysis

LinkedIn is one of the most widely used social media platforms. Launched in 2003 and has millions of users around the globe. It is a business-oriented application commonly used to find jobs, connect with people, share personal and professional information, private messaging, etc. On the other hand, the footprint of LinkedIn usage can be used by criminals or hackers to their advantage, especially for masquerading and blackmailing. Forensics investigation tools, methodology, and techniques can be used to uncover crimes committed against LinkedIn accounts. This paper investigates the privacy and security of LinkedIn using a digital forensics investigation process on Windows 10. The specific focus of this research is to investigate LinkedIn activities through memory forensics. The memory forensics process was carefully performed on the device’s memory as well as on the virtual machine-generated files. In addition, to determine the effects of LinkedIn privacy settings, we perform two sets of memory forensics experiments: one with no LinkedIn Privacy settings, and one after applying LinkedIn privacy settings. We determine the effects of the application of LinkedIn privacy settings through memory forensics.