Phishing Analysis

Phishing analysis is the process of systematically examining suspicious emails to determine whether they are malicious, how they attempt to deceive recipients, and what infrastructure they leverage. Analysts inspect email headers, authentication records, embedded URLs, attachments, and visual spoofing techniques to build a complete picture of the attack. Findings inform incident response, threat intelligence, and defensive controls.

Phishing remains the leading initial access vector in breaches, making accurate triage a critical DFIR skill — misclassifying a phishing email can delay containment and allow credential theft or malware deployment to go undetected. Proper analysis also surfaces attacker infrastructure such as lookalike domains and bulletproof hosting, enabling proactive blocking across the organization.

Analysis begins with parsing raw email headers (RFC 5322) to reconstruct the delivery path and verify authentication results: SPF checks whether the sending IP is authorized, DKIM validates the cryptographic signature, DMARC confirms policy alignment, and ARC preserves the authentication chain across forwarding hops. Analysts then inspect the visible sender address and display name for homoglyph substitutions — Unicode characters that visually mimic legitimate letters — as well as link-display mismatches where anchor text differs from the true destination URL. Embedded URLs are extracted and submitted to reputation feeds and sandboxes, while attachments are statically analyzed for macros, exploits, or second-stage payloads. QR codes embedded in images require an additional decoding step before their destination URLs can be evaluated.