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

Exploring PSTs – pst_indexer.py


In this script, we will harvest information about the PST file, taking note of the messages in each folder and generating statistics for word usage, frequent senders, and a heat map for all e-mail activity. Using these metrics, we can go beyond the initial collection and reporting of messages, and explore trends in language used or communication patterns with certain individuals. The statistics section highlights examples of how we can utilize the raw data and build informative graphics to assist the examiner. We recommend tailoring the logic to your specific investigation to provide the most informative report possible. For example, for the word count, we will only be looking at the top ten words that are alphanumeric and longer than four characters, to help reduce common words and symbols. This might not provide the correct information for your investigation and might require tailoring to your specific situation.

An overview

As with our other chapters, this...