Ground Report

Forensics involves in various strategies to determine the truth. It has also various ways to extract data from the Electronic Medias as well, implementing newest technologies. MS Outlook being a wide-spread application too has been involved as a prime source of evidences. Hacking, data breaches, cyber threats involved at organizational level always calls for Outlook forensics analysis as most of the organizations are having MS Outlook as their desktop email application. Email forensics tools have multiple options to search through the Outlook storage file and the most important view is Hex view. Below stated segment will cover about this Hex view and its significance in forensics.

What is Hex View and How it Helps for Investigation?

Hexadecimal numbering system was developed to get convenience in reading and writing binary strings as set of four bits as the binary sting for large base 10 decimal number is very long. Hex number is Base of 16 and maximum 16 digit symbol is used to represent binary value.

In forensics arena, hex value can be created of all the data elements. It can be created for text, videos, documents, and other data elements. Outlook emails when viewed in Hex code, it helps to verify the data integrity. Thus investigators can trace out if any differences have occurred in the emails and any fluctuations in the emails directly lead towards the crime evidences. Any changes done to the emails are reflected through the technical properties altered in the email.

Let us take an example of that; consider a situation where user has deleted some messages from MS Outlook account and has overwritten it. Hex view can help investigators to get through the physical content stored in it. Hex view also help the users for other –purpose like cracking copy-protected software, fragmenting computer virus to study it and in forensics arena it is highly used to retrieve information from different files like MS Outlook forensics analysis. This type of view for emails generated by web-mail service or desktop service can be useful to scan through each and every detail.

Conclusion:

Email forensics tool integrated with such facility of providing hex view is preferred for the investigation for e.g. MailXaminer. This software has various set of utilities providing better search functionality, multiple view options, supports various email file formats including Outlook PST file and hence is an optimum choice for Outlook forensics analysis. Such tools help to reach the goal through structured investigation approach.