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

Further automating databases – file_lister_peewee.py


In this iteration, we will use third-party Python modules to further automate our SQL and HTML setup. This will introduce extra overhead; however, our script will be simpler to implement and more streamlined, which would allow us to more easily develop further functionality in the future. Developing with an eye towards the future helps prevent us from rewriting the entire script for every minor feature request.

We have imported the majority of the standard libraries required before and added the third-party unicodecsv module (version 0.14.1). This module wraps around the built-in csv module and automatically provides the Unicode support for the CSV output. To keep things familiar, we can even name it csv by using the import...as... statement on line 4. As this is a third-party library, it will need to be installed on the user's machine for our code to run properly and can be done so with pip.

001 import os
002 import sys
003 import logging...