The practice of looking through email exchanges to locate information, collect proof, and assess the authenticity of an email’s source and content is known as email investigation. This digital forensics method looks at email headers, content, attachments, and routing paths to investigate fraudulent activity, cyber-attacks, and other hostile acts. It is applied in corporate, civil, and criminal issues.
The practice of gathering and analysing information from email correspondence is known as email forensics or an email investigation.
Finding evidence that can be used in court proceedings and comprehending the entire extent of a security event are the objectives of the effort.
What email investigation consists of?
Examining the fields within an email’s header to discover information such as the sender’s IP address, routing information, timestamps, and authentication results (such SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) is known as email header analysis.
“Content analysis” refers to the process of scanning an email word-for-word for indications of fraud or criminal intent.
An investigation into attachments and links is required to ascertain whether they are dangerous or direct users to a dangerous website.
Finding similarities in email messages that can indicate a more extensive coordinated effort, like a phishing operation, is known as pattern recognition.
“Forensic recovery” refers to the procedures used to recover mistakenly deleted emails or other possibly lost or hidden material.
In the event that server logs are not available, investigators can ascertain the email’s path by looking at logs from network devices such as switches and routers.
Why email investigation is used?
An investigation is required to determine the origin of cybercrime, such as malware distribution, phishing efforts, or business email compromise (BEC) scams.
The availability of digital evidence that can be utilised in civil or criminal courts may be advantageous for legal actions involving incidents of fraud, harassment, or intellectual property theft.
Internal problems that could lead to a company’s inquiry include fraud, data breaches, and employee disagreements.
There are numerous ways to read emails, recover deleted emails, perform mass email forensics, and preserve digital evidence utilising the MD5 and SHA1 hashing algorithms, email investigation among other capabilities of ESPY. Case management and the production of evidence reports for use in criminal investigations are further features of these systems. The combination of tagging, bookmarking, and log management makes it simple to manage numerous huge mailboxes.
