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

About timestamps


As mentioned in the introduction, there are a wide array of timestamp formats, some of which we've already encountered, such as UNIX time, and Windows FILETIME. This makes the conversion process more difficult as forensic scripts we develop may need to be prepared to process multiple time formats. Timestamp formats often boil down to two components: a reference point and a convention or algorithm used to represent the amount of time that has passed from the said reference point. Documentation exists for most timestamps and can help us determine the best means to convert the raw time data into a human-readable timestamp.

Python has several standard libraries bundled in the distribution that can help us convert timestamps. We have used the datetime module before to properly handle time values and store them within a Python object. We will introduce two new libraries—time, which is part of the standard library, and the third-party dateutil module. We can download and install...