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

Challenge


There are a few directions in which we could take this script. As mentioned, there is a great deal of potentially useful data that we are not writing out to a file. It might be useful to store the entire dictionary structure in a JSON file so that others can easily import and manipulate the data. This would allow us to utilize the parsed structure in a separate program and create additional reports from it.

Another useful feature we could develop is a timeline report or graphic for the user. This report would list the current contents of each record and then show progression from the current contents of the records to their older versions or even non-existing records. A tree-diagram or flowchart might be a good means of visualizing change for a particular database record.

Finally, add in a function that supports processing of varint that can be greater than 2 bytes. In our script, we made a simplifying assumption that we were unlikely to encounter a varint greater than 2 bytes. However...