Email files contain a large amount of valuable information, allowing forensic examiners to gain greater insight into communications and the activity of users over time. Using open source libraries, we're able to explore PST files and extract information about the messages and folders within. We also examined the content and metadata of messages to gather additional information about frequent contacts, common words, and abnormal hot spots of activity. Through this automated process, we can gather a better understanding of the data we review and begin to identify hidden trends. The code for this project can be downloaded from GitHub or Packt, as described in the Preface.
Identifying hidden information is very important in all investigations and is one of the many reasons that data recovery is an important cornerstone in the forensic investigation process.
In the next...