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Labs / Email Header Forensics

  • Daily Challenge
  • Released 03 Oct 2025

📧 Can you uncover the truth hidden in email headers?

A suspicious email claiming to be from PayPal has landed in your inbox, but something doesn't add up! 🕵️ Email headers hold the digital fingerprints that phishers try to hide. Armed with forensic analysis skills, you'll trace the real origin of this message and discover evidence hidden in plain sight. 🔍 Time to put on your investigator hat and expose this phishing attempt!

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Daily Challenge
Free Access
Start Lab Environment

Launch your dedicated AWS machine to begin hacking

~1-2 min setup
AWS dedicated
Private instance
Industry standard
Daily Challenge

📧 Email Forensics: Phishing Investigation

Email header analysis is a critical skill for cybersecurity professionals. Phishing emails often masquerade as legitimate communications, but email headers contain digital fingerprints that reveal their true origin. This challenge teaches you to analyze email headers, detect spoofing attempts, and uncover hidden evidence in email metadata.

🎯 What You'll Learn
  • ✓ Email header structure and analysis
  • ✓ Identifying spoofed sender addresses
  • ✓ Tracing email routing and origination
  • ✓ Base64 encoding and decoding
  • ✓ Phishing detection indicators
  • ✓ Digital forensics investigation methods
🔍 Challenge Overview

You'll investigate a suspicious email claiming to be from PayPal. By analyzing the email headers and metadata, you'll uncover evidence of a phishing attempt and discover forensic artifacts hidden within the message. Your task is to trace the email's true origin and find the investigation case flag.

Real-World Application: Email header analysis is used daily by SOC analysts, incident responders, and threat intelligence teams to investigate phishing campaigns, track threat actors, and protect organizations from email-based attacks. These skills are essential for cybersecurity careers.