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

Challenge


We recommend experimenting with the code to learn how it works or try to improve its functionality. For example, checking whether the user supplied two arguments would be better suited at the beginning of the main() function rather than checking after the bulk of the program has executed. Another simple check might be determining that the vendor and product ID are both four characters in length. Anything less or greater should be refused as all vendor and product IDs in the dictionary are four characters long.

We have provided a file named usb.ids in the code packet containing the USB data source from the webpage of interest. Rather than using urllib2 to access the data source online, we recommend modifying the script to work with the usb.ids local file. This can expand the script functionality for those lacking an Internet connection or are running the script offline. Programs are constantly evolving and are never truly finished products. There are plenty of other improvements...