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

Additional challenges


For this project, we invite you to implement some improvements that will make our script more versatile. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, pypff does not currently natively support the extraction or direct interaction with attachments. We can, however, call the pffexport and pffinfo tools within our Python script to do so. We recommend looking at the subprocess module to accomplish this. To extend this further, how can we connect this with the code covered in Chapter 8, The Media Age What type of data might become available once we have access to the attachments?

Consider methods that would allow a user to provide filtering options to collect specific messages of interest rather than the entire PST. A library that may assist in providing additional configuration options to the user is ConfigParser and can be installed with pip. Finally, another challenge might see improvements to the HTML report by adding additional charts and graphs. One example might be to parse...