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)

The missing link

Recipe Difficulty: Medium

Python Version: 2.7

Operating System: Linux

Shortcut files, also known as link files, are common across operating system platforms. They enable the user to use one file to reference another, located elsewhere on the system. On the Windows platform, these link files also record historical access to the files they reference. Generally, the creation time of a link file represents the first access time of a file with that name, and the modification time represents the most recent access time of the file with that name. Using this, we can extrapolate a window of activity and learn about how, and where, these files were accessed.

Getting started

This recipe requires the installation of...