Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Overview of this book

Digital forensic analysis is the process of examining and extracting data digitally and examining it. Python has the combination of power, expressiveness, and ease of use that makes it an essential complementary tool to the traditional, off-the-shelf digital forensic tools. This book will teach you how to perform forensic analysis and investigations by exploring the capabilities of various Python libraries. The book starts by explaining the building blocks of the Python programming language, especially ctypes in-depth, along with how to automate typical tasks in file system analysis, common correlation tasks to discover anomalies, as well as templates for investigations. Next, we’ll show you cryptographic algorithms that can be used during forensic investigations to check for known files or to compare suspicious files with online services such as VirusTotal or Mobile-Sandbox. Moving on, you’ll learn how to sniff on the network, generate and analyze network flows, and perform log correlation with the help of Python scripts and tools. You’ll get to know about the concepts of virtualization and how virtualization influences IT forensics, and you’ll discover how to perform forensic analysis of a jailbroken/rooted mobile device that is based on iOS or Android. Finally, the book teaches you how to analyze volatile memory and search for known malware samples based on YARA rules.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Where to go from here


If you like to test the tools and knowledge gained from this book, we have the following two tips for you:

  • Create a lab with two virtual machines—Metasploit and Metasploitable. Try to hack into your Metasploitable system and perform a forensic analysis afterwards. Are you able to reconstruct the attack and gather all the Indicators of Compromise?

  • Get some old hard drives, which are no longer used but have been used regularly in the past. Perform a forensic analysis on these drives and try to reconstruct as much data as possible. Are you able to reconstruct former operations on these drives?

If you like to enhance your knowledge on some of the topics that were covered in this book, the following books are a really good choice:

  • Practical Mobile Forensics by Satish Bommisetty, Rohit Tamma, Heather Mahalik, Packt Publishing

  • The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory by Michael Hale Ligh, Andrew Case, Jamie Levy and AAron Walters...