Proactive Acquisition using Bot on Discord

Abstract

Data deletion increases challenges in cybercrime investigation. To address the problem, proactive forensics for evidentiary collection is acknowledged to help investigators to acquire the potentially needed digital evidence. This study proposes a bot machine to record data from the Discord server in advance, hashing and saving it in proper storage for further forensic analysis. The recording process can be managed to collect activities and their related data (intact, modified, deleted), including text, pictures, videos, and audio. The Discord bot is designed by utilizing the main features of the Discord Social Networks Application Programming Interface (API). This paper examines how this approach is applicable by embedding the bot in a Discord server. Observation showed that the bot records the real-time data as it is always alive on the server, including the deleted or modified messages and their timestamps. All the recorded data is saved locally on the server’s storage in easy-to-read formats, CSV and JSON. The results showed that the bot could conduct the data acquisition for 37 concurrent users with a 2.3% error rate and 97.7% accuracy.