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 11. Parsing Outlook PST Containers

Electronic mail (e-mail) has been one of the most popular forms of communication on electronic devices. E-mails can be sent from computers, websites, and the phones in so many pockets across the globe. This medium allows for the transmission of information in the form of text, HTML, attachments, and more in a reliable fashion. It is no wonder then, that e-mails can play a large part in investigations, especially for cases involving the workplace. In this chapter, we are going to work with a common e-mail format, Personal Storage Table (PST), used by Microsoft Outlook to store e-mail content in a single file.

The following script introduces us to a series of operations available via the libpff library developed by Joachim Metz. This library allows us to open the PST file and explore its contents in a Pythonic manner. Additionally, the code we build demonstrates how to create dynamic HTML-based graphics to provide additional context to spreadsheet...