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

The UserAssist framework


Our UserAssist framework is made up of three scripts, userassist.py, csv_writer.py, and xlsx_writer.py. Userassist.py handles the bulk of the processing logic and then passes the results to the CSV or XLSX writer. The directory structure of our framework is given later. Our writers are contained within a directory named Writers. Remember that for a directory to be "searchable" by Python, it needs to include the __init__.py file. This file may be empty, contain functions and classes, or contain code to be executed on import:

  |-- userassist.py
  |-- Writers
      |-- __init__.py
      |-- csv_writer.py
      |-- xlsx_writer.py

Developing our UserAssist logic processor – userassist.py

The userassist.py script is responsible for handling user input, creating the log, and parsing UserAssist data from the NTUSER.DAT file. On lines 1 through 7, we import familiar and new modules to facilitate our tasks. The Registry and struct modules will grant us access to and then extract...