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

Setup API


The setupapi.dev.log file is a Windows log file that tracks device connections for a variety of devices including USB devices. Since USB device information plays an important role in many investigations, our script will help identify the earliest installation time of a USB device on a machine. This log is system-wide, not user-specific, and therefore provides only the installation time of a USB device's first connection to the system. In addition to logging this timestamp, the log contains the vendor ID (VID), product ID (PID), and serial number of the device. With this information, we can paint a better picture of removable storage activity. On Windows XP this file is located at C:\Windows\setupapi.log. On Windows 7 and higher, this file is found at C:\Windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log.