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

Our first iteration – bitcoin_address_lookup.v1.py


The first iteration of our script will focus primarily on ingesting and processing the data appropriately. In this script, we will print out transaction summaries for the account to the console. In later iterations, we will add logging and outputting data to a CSV file:

001 import argparse
002 import json
003 import urllib2
004 import unix_converter as unix
005 import sys
006
007 __author__ = 'Preston Miller & Chapin Bryce'
008 __date__ = '20160401'
009 __version__ = 0.01
010 __description__ = 'This scripts downloads address transactions using blockchain.info public APIs'

We will use five modules in the initial version of the script. The argparse, json, urllib2, and sys modules are all part of the standard library. The unix_converter module is the mostly unmodified script that we wrote in Chapter 2, Python Fundamentals, and is used here to convert Unix timestamps in the Bitcoin transaction data. Both argparse and urllib2 have been used...