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

Summary


Hashing is an important facet to the forensics community. While most use cases of hashing are focused on integrity checking, the use of a fuzzy or rolling hash allows us to explore similarity at a byte level. This process can provide insight for malware detection, identification of restricted documents on unapproved resources, and discovery of closely related items based on content only. Through the use of third-party libraries, we are able to lean on the power behind the C-languages with the flexibility of the Python interpreter and build powerful tools that are user and developer friendly. The code for this project can be downloaded from https://packtpub.com/books/content/support.

Metadata, "data about data", has proved to play a valuable role in investigations. In the next chapter, you will learn how to extract embedded metadata from within various files. Some of the file types included are images, audio, and office documents.