Blue Skies from (X?s) Pain: A Digital Forensic Analysis of Threads and Bluesky
Joseph F. Brown, Abdur Rahman Onik, Ibrahim Baggili · 2024
This paper presents a comprehensive digital forensic analysis of the social media platforms Threads and Bluesky, juxtaposing their unique architectures and functionalities against X. This research fills a gap in the extant literature by offering a novel forensic analysis of Threads and Bluesky, based on established techniques. Mobile forensic analysis of both platforms yielded few results. Network analysis produced a variety of artifacts for Bluesky, including plaintext passwords. Threads proved to be robust, and a presentation of its security and API flow is presented. A detailed depiction of the forensic analysis performed for this paper is presented to aid future investigators.