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)

Gathering intel

Recipe Difficulty: Medium

Python Version: 3.5

Operating System: Any

In this recipe, we use VirusTotal, a free online virus, malware, and URL scanner, to automate the review of potentially malicious websites or files. VirusTotal maintains detailed documentation of their API on their website. We will demonstrate how to perform basic queries against their system using their documented API and store returned results into a CSV file.

Getting started

To follow this recipe, you need to first create an account with VirusTotal and decide between the free public API or the private API. The public API has request limitations, which the private API does not. For example, with the public API, we are limited to 4 requests...