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

Chapter 5. Databases in Python

In this chapter, we leverage databases in our scripts to help us accomplish meaningful tasks when working with large quantities of data. We have chosen a simple example that demonstrates the capabilities and benefits of a database backend with Python. We will store file metadata that has been recursively indexed from a given root directory into a database and then query it to generate reports. Although it may seem a simple feat, the purpose is to focus on showcasing multiple ways in which we can interact with a database in Python by creating an active file listing.

In this chapter, we will delve into the following areas:

  • The basic design and implementation of SQLite3 databases

  • Working with these databases in Python using the first and third-party modules

  • Understanding how to recursively iterate through directories in Python

  • The knowledge of file system metadata and methods of accessing it using Python

  • Crafting CSV and HTML reports for the review process