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)

The UserAssist framework

Our UserAssist framework is made up of three scripts, userassist_parser.py, csv_writer.py, and xlsx_writer.py. The userassist_parser.py script handles the bulk of the processing logic and then passes the results to the CSV or XLSX writer. The directory structure of our framework is shown as follows. Our writers are contained within a directory named Writers. Remember that for a directory to be searchable by Python, it needs to include the __init__.py file. This file may be empty, contain functions and classes, or contain code to be executed upon import:

  |-- userassist_parser.py 
  |-- Writers 
      |-- __init__.py 
      |-- csv_writer.py 
      |-- xlsx_writer.py 

Developing our UserAssist logic processor – userassist_parser.py

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