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

Additional challenges


We talked extensively about the additions that Windows 7 brought to the UserAssist artifact. However, there are even more changes that we did not account for in our current implementation of the UserAssist framework. With Windows 7, some common folder names were replaced with GUIDs. The following is a table of some examples of folders and their respective GUID:

Folder

GUID

UserProfiles

{0762D272-C50A-4BB0-A382-697DCD729B80}

Desktop

{B4BFCC3A-DB2C-424C-B029-7FE99A87C641}

Documents

{FDD39AD0-238F-46AF-ADB4-6C85480369C7}

Downloads

{374DE290-123F-4565-9164-39C4925E467B}

An improvement to our script might involve finding these and other common folder GUIDs and replacing them with the true path. A list of some of these common GUIDs can be found on Microsoft's MSDN website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb882665.aspx.

Alternatively, the graph we chose to chart the last 10 executables may not be the best way of presenting dates graphically. It might be worthwhile...