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)

Parsing Outlook PST Containers

Electronic mail (email) continues to be one of the most common methods of communication in the workplace, surviving the number of new communication services present in today's world. Emails can be sent from computers, websites, and the phones that're in so many pockets across the globe. This medium allows for the transmission of information in the form of text, HTML, attachments, and more in a reliable fashion. It's no wonder, then, that emails can play a large part in investigations, especially for cases involving the workplace. In this chapter, we're going to work with a common email format, Personal Storage Table (PST), used by Microsoft Outlook to store email content in a single file.

The script we'll develop in this chapter introduces us to a series of operations available through the libpff library developed by Joachim...