Media persistence in the android client and the server-side of Discord

Abstract

Messaging apps like Whatsapp, Telegram and Discord are being used for different activities, such as communication, content distribution and advertising. However, these apps could be used as well by criminals for illegal activities. As more crimes are either planned or committed in messaging apps, it becomes important to analyses those apps and understand the artifacts generated by them. This project will investigate Discord. It aims to find if media files that were exchanged and deleted by using Discord persist on its servers after deletion. Another goal is to find if it is possible to recover these files from the android devices. This project has resulted in locating important artifacts of deleted messages, account, channels and servers in the Android devices. This project also has discovered that media files that were posted by deleted account, posted on a deleted server or posted on a deleted channel persists on Discord server-side for an unknown period. On the other hand, deleted media files were removed from discord servers.