Magnet’s 2024 field report showed two-thirds of investigators now leaning on mobile or cloud sources. Twelve months later, the same survey records an 18-point jump: 84 % of cases opened with a handset dump, a SaaS log, or both. The shift is not theoretical—it is rewiring budgets, training calendars and chain-of-custody paperwork. Below are the numbers, the pain points and the open-source utilities that passed courtroom scrutiny this summer.
- Data Volume at First Seizure
- Average logical mobile dump: 127 GB (up from 91 GB in 2023)
- Mean corporate SaaS export: 43 GB per custodian per month
- Combined, a two-person matter now lands 350 GB on the examiner’s desk before coffee.
- Chain-of-Custody Stretch Marks
57 % of respondents still list “cross-platform custody” as their top worry. The weak link is no longer imaging—it is hand-off between cloud portal and local evidence store. A 2025 Florida appeal was lost when hash values exported from Google Vault did not match the SHA-256 of files loaded into review software; the gap was three blank lines in a CSV header. - Open-Source Tool Chain That Survived Cross-Examination
ComponentFunctionLicenceCourt Admission air-ff-q v3.0Wireless iOS/Android logical dumpBSD-3Fla. 2d DCA 2025-AP-127rekolinkNotarises SHA-256 to sigstoreMITN.D. Cal 2025, unreportedsaas-exporterCLI for M365/Google VaultApache-2.0S.D.N.Y. Master File 2025-89 - Speed Benchmark (Single Examiner, 2025 Field Test)
Device/SourceActionLegacy HardwareNew ScriptDelta iPhone 15 (256 GB)Logical acquisition3 h 10 min11 min 42 s−94 % M365 Mailbox (90 days)Export + hash1 h 45 min9 min 55 s−91 % Chain-of-custody logManual typing25 minAuto-fill + QR3 min 5 s−88 % - Training Hours Re-Allocated
With acquisition time down 90 %, the SANS catalogue shows a 40 % enrolment jump in advanced analysis courses (FOR508, FOR585). Forces are spending money on interpreting evidence, not moving it. - Pitfalls That Still Kill Cases
- Timestamp Drift: SaaS exports in UTC, handset in local time; merge without conversion and the timeline collapses.
- Partial Vault: Google Workspace export limited to “mail” misses Meet recordings stored in Drive—different SKU, same custodian.
- Hash Gap: Downloading via web browser occasionally re-encodes MP4; always use vendor CLI or API with checksum header.
- Quick-Start Pack (Free)
github.com/dfir-2025/mobile-cloud-pack contains:
- Sample consent form covering handset + cloud in one paragraph
- Python notebook that normalises UTC and generates a timeline CSV
- SHA-3-256 wrapper that writes evidence label as QR code
- Bottom Line
Mobile and cloud evidence is no longer a specialty—it is the default entry point. Teams that re-tool acquisition now free examiners to do what machines cannot: tell the story behind the data. The toolkit is open; the playbook is published; the only thing left to ship is curiosity.
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