Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By : Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By: Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

Digital forensics plays an integral role in solving complex cybercrimes and helping organizations make sense of cybersecurity incidents. This second edition of Learning Python for Forensics illustrates how Python can be used to support these digital investigations and permits the examiner to automate the parsing of forensic artifacts to spend more time examining actionable data. The second edition of Learning Python for Forensics will illustrate how to develop Python scripts using an iterative design. Further, it demonstrates how to leverage the various built-in and community-sourced forensics scripts and libraries available for Python today. This book will help strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. By the end of this book, you will build a collection of Python scripts capable of investigating an array of forensic artifacts and master the skills of extracting metadata and parsing complex data structures into actionable reports. Most importantly, you will have developed a foundation upon which to build as you continue to learn Python and enhance your efficacy as an investigator.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Moving on to our writers

Within the writers directory, we have two scripts: csv_writer.py and kml_writer.py. Both of these writers are called depending on the types of data being processed in the metadata_parser.py framework.

Writing spreadsheets – csv_writer.py

In this chapter, we'll use csv.DictWriter instead of csv.writer, just like we did in Chapter 5, Databases in Python, and Chapter 6, Extracting Artifacts from Binary Files. As a reminder, the difference is that the DictWriter writes dictionary objects to a CSV file and the csv.writer function is more suited for writing lists.

The great thing about csv.DictWriter is that it requires an argument, fieldnames, when creating the writer object. The fieldnames...