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 9. Uncovering Time

Timestamps are stored in a wide variety of formats unique to the operating system or application responsible for their generation. In forensics, converting these timestamps can be an important aspect of an investigation. For example, we may aggregate converted timestamps and create a combined timeline of events to determine a sequence of actions across mediums. This evaluation of time can help us establish if actions are within a defined scope and provide insight into the relationship between two events.

To decipher these formatted timestamps, we can use tools to interpret the raw values and convert them into human-readable time. Most forensic tools perform this operation silently as they parse known artifact structures (similarly to how our scripts have often parsed Unix timestamps). In some cases, we do not have tools that properly or uniformly handle specific timestamps and will have to rely on our ingenuity to decipher the time value. In this chapter, we will...