Analyze QQ Conversations and Chats
QQ is a Chinese instant messaging application. QQ is vastly popular in Chinese-speaking community. With its huge subscriber base, QQ is the most popular instant messenger in the world. This is why we paid special attention to extracting QQ chats in our forensic chat analyzer.
Extracting and analyzing QQ conversations is a matter of locating, acquiring and parsing all history files belonging to all user accounts registered on the computer. Belkasoft Evidence Center can analyze QQ chats even in its most affordable edition, Forensic IM Analyzer.
Forensic IM Analyzer can extract QQ conversations quickly, efficiently and completely automatically. The tool automatically locates QQ chat logs, parses history files and presents QQ conversations to the investigator in plain text. At the time of this writing, QQ 2008, 2009 , 2010, 2011 and 2012 are supported. Subsequent versions of QQ messenger are added quickly after they are being released.
Forensic IM Analyzer delivers investigators an affordable tool allowing to extract QQ log files, analyze chats and review communication histories and contact databases of a wide range of instant messengers. The list of supported messengers includes Skype, AOL, ICQ, MSN and Live! Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, RQ, Miranda, MySpace IM, SIM, QIP, QIP Infium, Trillian, AIM, Digsby, Rambler Virtus, Mail.Ru Agent, QQ, and many other instant messengers for Windows, Linux and MacOS. Forensic IM Analyzer can analyze communications occurring in more than 80 instant messengers (full list at forensic.belkasoft.com/en/bec/en/Instant_Messenger_Support.asp).
The How-To Guide on Extracting QQ Conversations
Extracting QQ chat logs is tricky, and is approached in a different way compared to other messengers. What sets QQ history logs apart from other history types is that acquiring QQ chats in QQ 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 requires additional information.
The latest few versions of QQ messenger are very cryptic. Unlike many other messengers, QQ 2009/2010/2011/2012 makes it impossible to extract any chat history at all if a history file is all you have.
In order to successfully extract QQ 2009, 2010, 2011 or 2012 history, you will need either of the following:
- A hard drive with the original QQ and Windows installation and an active Internet connection, or
- The original QQ user password and an active Internet connection, or
- The resulting output of QqDiagnostics (Belkasoft's live box analysis tool) launched at a user's PC with an active Internet connection.
Without satisfying any of those conditions, successful QQ history extraction will not be possible. In particular, it will be impossible to extract QQ chats without having an active connection to the Internet.
Finally, it is only possible to extract QQ conversation history if the user saved their password by selecting the Remember my password checkbox, or if you know the user's QQ password. Note that stored password data expires some time after the user last login session, so even with the Remember my password option selected you may be unable to recover QQ chats if the last login was performed a long time ago.
More technical information about extracting QQ chats is available at Extracting QQ History.
Compare editions or download the free evaluation version.
