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

Our first iteration – setupapi_parser.v1.py


The goal of our first iteration is to develop a functional prototype that we will improve upon in later iterations. We will continue to see the following code block in all our scripts, which provides basic documentation about the script:

001 __author__ = 'Preston Miller & Chapin Bryce'
002 __date__ = '20160401'
003 __version__ = 0.01
004 __description__ = 'This scripts reads a Windows 7 Setup API log and prints USB Devices to the user'

Our script involves three functions which are outlined below. The main() function kicks off the script by calling the parse_setupapi() function. This function reads the setupapi.dev.log file and extracts the USB device and first installation date information. After processing, the print_output() function is called with the extracted information. The print_output() function takes the extracted information and prints it to the user in the console. These three functions work together to allow us to segment our code...