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

An introduction to libpff


The libpff library allows us to reference and navigate through PST objects in a programmatic manner. The root_folder() function allows us to reference the RootFolder, which is the base of the PST and the starting point for our recursive analysis of e-mail content. Within the RootFolder are folders and messages. The folders can contain other subfolders or messages. Folders have properties that include the name of the folder, the number of sub-folders, and the number of sub-messages. Messages are objects representing messages and has attributes, including the subject line, the name of all participants, and several time stamps.

How to install libpff and pypff

Installing some third-party libraries can be more difficult than others and, unfortunately, that is the case here. That being said, this process is not too onerous and should be simple enough by following our instructions. We must download and build libpff from source. We cannot rely on pip to easily install this...