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 Media Age

Metadata, or data describing data, is a powerful artifact an examiner can leverage to answer investigative questions. Broadly speaking, metadata can be found through examination of filesystems and embedded elements. File permissions, MAC timestamps, and file size are recorded at the filesystem level. However, for specific file types, such as JPEGs, additional metadata is embedded within the file itself.

Embedded metadata is more specific to the object in question. This embedded metadata can provide additional sources of timestamps, the author of a particular document, or even GPS coordinates for a photo. Entire software applications, such as Phil Harvey's ExifTool, exist to extract embedded metadata from files and collate it with filesystem metadata.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Using first- and third-party libraries to extract metadata from...