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

Frameworks


Why build a framework? Oftentimes, we perform the same series of steps for a given piece of evidence. For example, we commonly prepare reports for link, prefetch, and jumplist files, examine registry keys, and establish external devices and network activity to answer forensic questions. As we've seen, we can develop a script to parse these artifacts for us and display the data in a format conducive for rapid analysis. Why not write a series of scripts, each responsible for one artifact, and then control them with a singular script, to execute all at once, and thus further automate our analysis?

A framework can be developed to run a series of scripts and parse multiple artifacts with a single command. The output of such a framework could be a series of analysis-ready spreadsheets. This allows the examiner to skip the same tedious series of steps to process items and start answering meaningful questions about the evidence

Frameworks typically have three main components:

  • A main controller...