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

Multiprocessing in Python – simple_multiprocessor.py


Python is designed in a manner that requires a set of instructions to be completed before executing the next set. This means that in order for Python to execute line 2, for example, it must first complete line 1. This is an important feature that affects all of our scripts and has allowed us to create linear, nonparallel programs. In some instances, it may be beneficial to perform operations simultaneously. In these situations, we can leverage the standard multiprocessing library.

This library allows us to spawn new processes to perform tasks. Our code will use the main process executed at runtime to spin up two additional processes. One process monitors for new processes on the system and the other process captures user information. The main process will monitor these two workers and handle the execution and status of each process.

To demonstrate this logic, we will build a small sample in the code block below. On the first two lines, we...