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)

Searching high and low

Recipe difficulty: Hard

Python version: 2.7

Operating system: Linux

Most modern operating systems maintain an index of files and other data content stored on the system. These indexes allow for more efficient searches across file formats, emails, and other content found on the system's volumes. On Windows, such an index is found in the Windows.edb file. This database is stored in the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) file format and found within the ProgramData directory. We will leverage another library from the libyal project to parse this file to extract information about the indexed content on the system.

Getting started

This recipe requires the installation of four third-party modules to function...