Use OCR in Email Attachments for Email Investigation
Let’s uncover how OCR in email attachments is most helpful to enhance email investigation. As we all know, today’s world is a complex world of digital investigations, and every email holds its own trove of evidence. But you ever think what happens when any important piece of information isn’t in your sight of plain text but instead hidden within a document, image or a PDF that was just an image. That is where OCR (optical Character Recognition) comes or emerges as a joker or true game-changer in email forensics.
Why OCR in Email Attachments is Necessary?
OCR, which stands for optical character recognition in a technology which is developed for conversion of various document types such as PDFs, images or scanned documents (in binary text) into readable and searchable text. In a digital forensics investigation, experts aim first to extract every possible clue from the given data or from data hidden beneath complex images.
However, when information is locked inside an image or a scanned document, we can also use traditional practices like keyword searches or metadata analysis simply, but we can say they aren’t enough, there will be a barrier that will be left behind and OCR helps break down this barrier, making the before unsearchable into searchable. So OCR in email attachments plays a crucial role in email forensic investigation.
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How is OCR in Email Attachments Helpful in Email Investigation?
- Fraud investigations: – Culprits or fraudsters frequently send fake invoices, altered documents, or most occurring forged signatures as scanned images.
How OCR helps: – OCR allows experts to extract and compare this text, aiding in the detection of forgery or manipulation. - Insider threat detection: – employees or experts might attempt to share confidential information by attaching photos of printed documents.
How OCR Helps: – OCR in email attachments helps extract and identify such unauthorized sharing, revealing crucial details. - Phishing Campaigns: – attackers might embed screenshots of fake login pages or instructions within emails.
How OCR Helps: – OCR can extract URLs or sensitive text from these images, aiding experts in tracing phishing patterns. - Data Recovery: – When dealing with multiple email attachments during a forensic investigation.
How OCR Helps: – OCR makes the content within image-based files readable, which leads to saving of valuable time and effort in forensic analysis.
How is OCR in Email Forensics Used for Investigation?
- Gather the attachments: Drag out of the archive email or stored email files like PST, OST, OLM, MBOX, etc.
- Polish the images: Filter the noise, adjust contrast, do whatever makes the OCR engines smile. Prepossess Find non-breaking whitespace, carriage returns, etc., except that there is also a non-breaking space. Find linefeeds except that we document a lining to a linefeed on the WARPS deck. Find binary conversions. Find binary conversions except that they can be O/I Alpha level 0. Calculate weather/alpha bits. Find binary corrections, except that they could be a simple O/I switch.
- Use the engine Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat Pro, or whichever tool you find handy to extract the text out of the pics.
- Indexing and review: enable the text to be searchable, thus enabling you to do keyword searches, highlight the key areas, and produce reports at short notice.
Taking a Couple of Words of Caution
- Firstly, OCR in email attachments is not 100 percent certain. Poor lighting or crummy handwriting can easily throw off OCR, so you should reaffirm the important stuff twice.
- Textual assistance may be at best a gamble; not all OCR engines are fond of the local dialect or exotic characters.
- OCR can signal tampering, but that is by no means the end of the line; always run specialized image forensics tools just to make sure.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that OCR in email attachments can appear as a wimpy addition, but when it comes to the work of forensic analysis on a piece of email, it can be a juggernaut that can lead you down the forgotten pathways, or detect a swindle, or discover something that you would not indicate seeing. OCR can work through a forged identity document, or a fake note secreted into a JPEG, and find the truth. It is one of the best forensic email intelligence techniques.