Investigating the Cyber Breach: The Digital Forensics Guide for the Network Engineer, First Edition

Chapter 10

Email and Social Media

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

—Cool Hand Luke

A Message in a Bottle

Did you know email is much older than ARPAnet or even the Internet? Would it shock you to learn that it evolved from simple beginnings that outdate most common internetworking technologies? The earliest email systems were MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and SNDMSG (www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html).

Here’s an overview of how an email system works: A user composes an email through an email client, which is referred to as a mail user agent (MUA). Today, many email clients used by the public are presented through a web interface such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and ...