Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By : Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By: Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

This book will illustrate how and why you should learn Python to strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. The tutorials use an interactive design, giving you experience of the development process so you gain a better understanding of what it means to be a forensic developer. Each chapter walks you through a forensic artifact and one or more methods to analyze the evidence. It also provides reasons why one method may be advantageous over another. We cover common digital forensics and incident response scenarios, with scripts that can be used to tackle case work in the field. Using built-in and community-sourced libraries, you will improve your problem solving skills with the addition of the Python scripting language. In addition, we provide resources for further exploration of each script so you can understand what further purposes Python can serve. With this knowledge, you can rapidly develop and deploy solutions to identify critical information and fine-tune your skill set as an examiner.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning Python for Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Building a keylogger for Windows


Keyloggers can be built with most programming languages that have the ability to make calls to the operating system. Because the operating system provides the methods required to monitor keystrokes, any programming language that is able to hook into these calls is capable of running a keylogger. Python is by no means the choice of many for keylogger design, but through this language, we can gain a better understanding of their design process. Plus it gives us an excuse to understand how to leverage the Windows API in Python. The keylogger we will design is noisy and would likely be detected by an advanced user or commercial AV product. Our goal is not to create a covert application, but instead to explore these low-level operating system-specific libraries. In this chapter, we will design a keylogger in Python that captures keystrokes, screenshots, the clipboard, and any newly created processes.

Using the Windows API

All operating systems have an API that allows...