Book Image

Python Digital Forensics Cookbook

By : Chapin Bryce, Preston Miller
Book Image

Python Digital Forensics Cookbook

By: Chapin Bryce, Preston Miller

Overview of this book

Technology plays an increasingly large role in our daily lives and shows no sign of stopping. Now, more than ever, it is paramount that an investigator develops programming expertise to deal with increasingly large datasets. By leveraging the Python recipes explored throughout this book, we make the complex simple, quickly extracting relevant information from large datasets. You will explore, develop, and deploy Python code and libraries to provide meaningful results that can be immediately applied to your investigations. Throughout the Python Digital Forensics Cookbook, recipes include topics such as working with forensic evidence containers, parsing mobile and desktop operating system artifacts, extracting embedded metadata from documents and executables, and identifying indicators of compromise. You will also learn to integrate scripts with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) such as VirusTotal and PassiveTotal, and tools such as Axiom, Cellebrite, and EnCase. By the end of the book, you will have a sound understanding of Python and how you can use it to process artifacts in your investigations.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Beautiful Soup

Recipe Difficulty: Medium

Python Version: 3.5

Operating System: Any

In this recipe, we create a website preservation tool leveraging the Beautiful Soup library. This is a library meant to process markup languages, such as HTML or XML, and can be used to easily process these types of data structures. We will use it to identify and extract all links from a web page in a few lines of code. This script is meant to showcase a very simplistic example of a website preservation script; it is by no means intended to replace existing software out there on the market.

Getting started

This recipe requires the installation of the third-party library bs4. This module can be installed via the following command. All other libraries...