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

Running Python without a command window


Before we dive into the complete code for this chapter, we have one last introductory component to discuss. So far in this book, we have used only the .py extension for the scripts we have developed. This, however, is not the only available extension for Python scripts. Another extension, and the one we use with this script, is .pyw, which instructs Python to not launch a command window with our script.

Depending on how you executed the script, you may have noticed that Python scripts require a command window when executed to display print statements, errors, and more. With this new extension, this window will not appear and we will not be able to view these messages or any output. This mode is designed to allow graphic applications to run in Python without the background command window or for scripts, like ours, that do not require a command window for operation. Here we will use it with a more malicious goal in mind.