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

Troubleshooting


At some point in your development career—probably by the time you write our first script—you will have encountered a Python error and received a Traceback message. The Traceback provides the context of the error and pinpoints the line that caused the issue. The issue itself is an exception and message of the error.

Python has a number of built-in exceptions whose purpose is to help the developer to diagnose errors in their code. Appendix B, Python Technical Details details solutions to common exceptions. It is not, however, an exhaustive list as some less common and user-created exceptions are not covered. A full list of built-in exceptions can be found at http://docs.python.org/2/library/exceptions.html.

Let's look at a simple example of an exception, AttributeError, and what the Traceback looks like in this case:

>>> import math
>>> print math.noattribute(5)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError...