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

Regular expressions in Python


Regular expression allows us to identify patterns of data by using generic search patterns. For example, searching for all possible phone numbers of type XXX-XXX-XXXX appearing in a document can be easily accomplished by one regular expression. We are going to create a regular expression module that will run a set of default expressions or a user-supplied expression against the processed WAL data. The purpose of the default expressions will be to identify relevant forensic information such as URLs or personally identifiable information (PII).

While this is not a primer on regular expression by any means, we will briefly touch on the basics so we can understand its advantages and the regular expressions used in the code. In Python, we use the re module to run regular expressions against strings. We must first compile the regular expression and then check if there are any matches in the string.

>>> import re
>>> phone = '214-324-5555'
>&gt...