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

Summary


In this chapter, we gained greater familiarity with common serialized structures, Bitcoin, CSV, and working with nested lists and dictionaries. Being able to manipulate lists and dictionaries is a vital skill, as data is often stored in mixed nested structures. Remember to always use the type() method to determine what type of data you're working with.

For this script, we (the authors) played around with the JSON data structure in the Python interactive prompt before writing the script. This allowed us to understand how to traverse the data structure correctly and the best manner to do so before writing any logic. The Python interactive prompt is an excellent sandbox to implement new features or to test new code. Visit https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support to download the code bundle for this chapter.

In the next chapter, we will discuss a different method of storing structured data. While learning how to integrate databases into our scripts, we will create an active file...