How is email evidence analyzed? Necessary Steps Explained
Emails are a necessary part in today’s digital world. People use emails to send messages, documents and even personal or sensitive data. As people also share their sensitive data, this makes criminals perform cybercrime through the medium of emails too. This is the reason email evidence or proof becomes important and necessary.
What Actually is Email Evidence?
Email evidence basically refers to the evidence or information found with the help of emails and can be used in legal investigation. This information can include:
- Threats
- Phishing or scam emails
- Leaked sensitive or confidential data
- Business information
Even if the emails are deleted, removed or hidden by the criminals, forensic experts can recover them.
How is Email Evidence Analyzed?
1. Collect Emails
The first and the most important step is to collect the emails. These can be found on:
- Computers
- Mobile Phones
- Company Servers etc.
Experts use special tools for making a Forensic Copy of the email data. This refers to copying the emails without changing anything.
2. Maintaining and Conserving the Evidence
Once the collection of emails are done, they should be maintained and conserved. If anyone deleted or removed something, the evidence will not be accepted by the court. Cyber experts use hashing which is a digital fingerprint.
3. Viewing the Headers of the Email
Every email contains a hidden part known as a header. It shows technical information such as:
- Who sent the email?
- Who got the email?
- Date and time
- IP Address
By viewing the headers of the email, forensic experts can find out if the email was original or the fake one. And where did the email come from.
4. Viewing Messages and Attachments
After viewing the headers of the email, they read and view the actual content of the email. In content, they look for:
- What was written.
- Any files that were attached
- Links and many more.
In many cases, the dangerous emails contain the attachments having viruses or links of the fake websites. Cybersics Cyber Security Service opens and analyzes the files or attachments without causing any damage or harm.
5. Recovering the Removed or Deleted Emails
Cyber criminals often try to hide their crimes by deleting or removing the emails. But there are chances that the forensic experts can recover the deleted or removed messages. Experts can try recovering emails from the following:
- Trash Folders
- Backup Files
- Hidden data and many more.
Recovering removed or deleted emails is an important part of email evidence analysis.
6. Analyzing the Behaviour
In some cases, the content of the email is not enough for analyzing the email evidence. Forensic experts and professionals also look at the behaviour of how people are communicating, at what time emails were sent and if there were any changes in the behaviour. Analyzing the behaviour helps in what basically is happening.
7. Generation of a Report
After the analysis is completed, a detailed and brief report is prepared. This detailed report includes:
- What emails were found?
- Who sent the emails?
- Who received the emails?
- Any sign or warning of fraud and many more.
Challenges Faced in Analyzing the Email
Here are the following changes faced in analyzing the email:
- Some emails look original and real but come out to be fake.
- Some emails are encrypted. However it can lead to difficulty in email evidence analysis.
- A person may have hundreds and thousands of emails.
- To access and check cloud-based emails, the investigators may need legal permissions.
Conclusion
Email evidence is a powerful part of digital or online investigations. Whether it involves cybercrimes, issues at the workplace and harassment, there are chances that email can hold some evidence. In this article, we learned about how is email evidence analyzed by the forensic investigators and the challenges faced by them while analyzing the email evidence.
