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)

Framework summary

Frameworks are incredibly useful to organize multiple collections of scripts under one roof, so to speak. There are challenges that come with frameworks; mainly keeping standardized operations through the growth of the project. Our metadata_parser.py framework is in its first iteration and, if we continue to develop it, we may find that the current setup is only suitable on a smaller level.

For example, as we implement more and more features, we might realize that the efficiency of our framework starts to lag. At that point, we would need to go back to the drawing board and determine whether we're using the correct data type or the best way to write our plugins and writers.