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

Introduction to Office metadata


With the launch of Office 2007, Microsoft introduced a new proprietary format for their Office products, such as "docx", "pptx", and "xlsx" files. These documents are actually a zipped directory consisting of XML and binary files. These documents have a great deal of embedded metadata stored in the XML files within the document. The two XML files we will look at are core.xml and app.xml that store different types of metadata.

The core.xml file stores metadata related to the document such as author, the revision number, and who last modified the document. The app.xml file stores metadata that is more specific to the contents of the file. For example, Word documents store page, paragraph, line, word, and character counts, whereas a PowerPoint presentation stores information related to slides, hidden slides, and note count among others.

To view this data, use an archive utility of your choice and unzip an existing 2007 or higher version Office document. You may...