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

Colorama


The colorama module (version 0.3.6) allows us to easily create colored terminal text. We are going to use this to highlight good and bad events to the user. For example, when a plugin completes without errors, we display that with a green font. Similarly, when an error is encountered, we will print that in red.

Traditionally, printing colored text to the terminal is achieved by a series of escape characters on Linux or OS X systems. This, however, will not work for Windows operating systems. The following are examples of ANSI escape characters being used to create colored text in Linux or OS X terminals.

The color format is the "escape" character,\033, followed by an open bracket and then the desired color code. We can change the background color in addition to the foreground color and even do both at the same time by separating the codes with a semicolon. The color code, 31m, sets the foreground text to red. The color code, 47m, sets the background to white. Notice in the second...