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


This script introduces GUIs and some of the methods available to us via the Tkinter module by converting timestamps. This script can be extended in many ways. We recommend the following challenges for those wishing to gain a better understanding of GUI development in Python.

As mentioned in the chapter, we only specify the conversion of three formats that are commonly seen in forensics and use several different methods to provide conversion. Try to add support for the FAT Directory Timestamp entry into the script, providing conversion to, and from, the raw format.

In addition, replace the output labels with entry fields so the user can copy and paste the results. A hint for this challenge is to look at the set() and readonly properties of the Entry widget. The last challenge we present is to allow the user to specify a time zone, either from the command-line or GUI interface. The pytz library may be of great use for this task.