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)

Reading the registry

Recipe Difficulty: Medium

Python Version: 2.7

Operating System: Linux

The Windows registry contains many important details related to the operating system configuration, user activity, software installation and usage, and so much more. These files are often heavily scrutinized and researched due to the number of artifacts they contain and their relevance to Windows systems. Parsing registry files gives us access to the keys and values that can reveal basic operating system information, access to folders and files, application usage, USB devices, and more. In this recipe, we focus on accessing common baseline information from the SYSTEM and SOFTWARE hives.

Getting started

This recipe requires the installation...