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

Chapter 10. Did Someone Say Keylogger?

Keyloggers are widely known utilities that can capture keystrokes and other runtime information. These tools are often considered malicious; however, they do have valid application to track system usage and study the interactions between users and their computers. Regardless of the purpose, these programs interact at a low level to capture user information. The code developed in this chapter is for educational use only and provides an opportunity to introduce Python's ability to interact with the Windows API. In addition to this, we will gain an understanding of malicious code in Python and how it works.

In this chapter, we will construct a keylogger to demonstrate the use of several libraries used to access features of the Windows operating system. We will also learn to use multiprocessing with Python to better take advantage of a system's resources. Though this chapter differs from the main focus of forensic script development, it introduces several...