A new tool to recover information stored in Smartphone’s volatile memory could give investigators important clues to solve a criminal case, say researchers. With the new device, the researchers from Purdue University move the focus from a smart phone's hard drive, which holds information after the phone is shut down, to the device's RAM, which is volatile memory. "We argue this is the frontier in cyber crime investigation in the sense that the volatile memory has the freshest information from the execution of all the apps," said lead researcher Dongyan Xu. "Investigators are able to obtain more timely forensic information toward solving a crime or an attack," Xu noted. Although the contents of volatile memory are gone as soon as the phone is shut down, it can reveal surprising amounts of forensic data if the device is up and running. The team's early research resulted in work that could recover the last screen displayed by an Android applica