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

Creating our first script – unix_converter.py


Our first script will perform a common timestamp conversion that will prove useful throughout the book. Named unix_converter.py, this script converts Unix timestamps into a human readable date and time value. Unix timestamps are formatted as an integer representing the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00.

On line 1, we import the datetime library, which has a utcfromtimestamp() function to convert Unix timestamps into datetime objects. On lines 3 through 6, we define variables that store documentation details relevant to the script. While this might be overkill for a small example, it is good to get in the habit of documenting your code early. Documentation can help maintain sanity when the code is revisited later or reviewed by another individual. After the initial setup and documentation, we define the main() function on line 9. The docstrings for our main() function are contained on lines 10 through 14. The docstrings contain a description...