Book Image

Python Digital Forensics Cookbook

By : Chapin Bryce, Preston Miller
Book Image

Python Digital Forensics Cookbook

By: Chapin Bryce, Preston Miller

Overview of this book

Technology plays an increasingly large role in our daily lives and shows no sign of stopping. Now, more than ever, it is paramount that an investigator develops programming expertise to deal with increasingly large datasets. By leveraging the Python recipes explored throughout this book, we make the complex simple, quickly extracting relevant information from large datasets. You will explore, develop, and deploy Python code and libraries to provide meaningful results that can be immediately applied to your investigations. Throughout the Python Digital Forensics Cookbook, recipes include topics such as working with forensic evidence containers, parsing mobile and desktop operating system artifacts, extracting embedded metadata from documents and executables, and identifying indicators of compromise. You will also learn to integrate scripts with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) such as VirusTotal and PassiveTotal, and tools such as Axiom, Cellebrite, and EnCase. By the end of the book, you will have a sound understanding of Python and how you can use it to process artifacts in your investigations.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Parsing PST and OST mailboxes

Recipe Difficulty: Hard

Python Version: 2.7

Operating System: Linux

The Personal Storage Table (PST) file is commonly found on many systems and provides access to archived email. These files, generally associated with the Outlook application, contain message and attachment data. These files are commonly found in the corporate setting, as many business environments continue to leverage Outlook for internal and external email management.

Getting started

This recipe requires the installation of the libpff, and its Python bindings, pypff, to function. Available on GitHub, this library provides tools, and Python bindings, to handle and extract data from PST files. We will set up this library in Ubuntu...