Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By : Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By: Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

Digital forensics plays an integral role in solving complex cybercrimes and helping organizations make sense of cybersecurity incidents. This second edition of Learning Python for Forensics illustrates how Python can be used to support these digital investigations and permits the examiner to automate the parsing of forensic artifacts to spend more time examining actionable data. The second edition of Learning Python for Forensics will illustrate how to develop Python scripts using an iterative design. Further, it demonstrates how to leverage the various built-in and community-sourced forensics scripts and libraries available for Python today. This book will help strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. By the end of this book, you will build a collection of Python scripts capable of investigating an array of forensic artifacts and master the skills of extracting metadata and parsing complex data structures into actionable reports. Most importantly, you will have developed a foundation upon which to build as you continue to learn Python and enhance your efficacy as an investigator.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Running the script

With our code complete, both the script and the HTML template, we're ready to execute the code! In our Ubuntu environment, we'll need to run the following command and provide our PST for analysis. If your Ubuntu machine has a configured web server, then the output could be placed in the web directory and served as a website for other users to view when visiting the server.

If you plan on using the Docker container method to run this code, you'll need to copy the PST file into your container using a command such as the one shown in the following. Please note that the following syntax is docker cp src_file container_name:/path/on/container and additional functionality is described with docker cp --help:

$ docker cp sample.pst pst_parser:/opt/book

Now that our PST is located within our container; we can run our script as follows:

The preceding...