Blue Skies from (X?s) Pain: A Digital Forensic Analysis of Threads and Bluesky
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Decentralizing power over infrastructure entails operating Clients, Servers, and Aggregators, imposing significant time, mental health, and financial costs on independent operators.
“Finally, decentralizing power over infrastructure entails operating Clients, Servers, and Aggregators, imposing significant time, mental health, and financial costs on independent operators as noted in recent work [5,8,15,18,51].”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [18]
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Hanny, D., Schmidt, S., & Resch, B. (2025) · Journal of Computational Social Science · doi:10.1007/s42001-025-00448-x · Cited by 4 · see citing works
“Brown, Onik, and Baggili [ 15 ] analysed Bluesky with regard to cybersecurity topics, identifying some security concerns such as plaintext passwords.”
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“Since Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, renamed it X, and disman-tled much of the platforms’ protections, the platform has been steadily losing users and advertisers (Brown et al., 2024; Li, 2024).”
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“Finally, decentralizing power over infrastructure entails operating Clients, Servers, and Aggregators, imposing significant time, mental health, and financial costs on independent operators as noted in recent work [5, 8, 15, 18, 51].”
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Security Vulnerability Assessment on Threads Application through Digital Forensics Analysis
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Yurdakul, H. (2025) · Akdeniz Üniversitesi İletişim Fakültesi Dergisi · doi:10.31123/akil.1705189
The URL NextDoor: A Digital Forensic Analysis of Neighborhood Apps
Brown, J., Onik, A. R., & Baggili, I. (2026) · International Symposium on Digital Forensics and Security (ISDFS) · doi:10.1109/isdfs69419.2026.11459105
“…analysis in uncovering user interactions and security flaws; many contemporary platforms minimize local storage in favor of cloud-based infrastructure, requiring forensic analysts to rely on network monitoring and API interactions instead of device-level extractions [5], [6], [14], [15].”
Self-citationDigital Forensics in the Deepfake Era: Evaluating Detection Algorithms on Image Sets
Ölvecký, M., Brlej, I., & Maár, L. (2026) · Lecture notes in networks and systems · doi:10.1007/978-3-032-20749-4_28
Huang, Y.-T., & Wang, T.-H. (2026) · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1080/10447318.2026.2664689
- Authors
- Brown, J., Onik, A. R., & Baggili, I.
- Affiliations
- Louisiana State University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2024-07-30
- Pages
- 1-12
- OpenAlex
- W4400978062
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 3.81
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Civil War Book Review (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Digital and Cyber Forensics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Digital Media Forensic Detection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Keywords
- digital forensics, threads, Bluesky, Twitter, social media forensics, network analysis, password recovery, API security, forensic artifacts
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