Chapter 1. Setting Up the Lab and Introduction to Python ctypes

Cyber Security and Digital Forensics are two topics of increasing importance. Digital forensics especially, is getting more and more important, not only during law enforcement investigations, but also in the field of incident response. During all of the previously mentioned investigations, it's fundamental to get to know the root cause of a security breach, malfunction of a system, or a crime. Digital forensics plays a major role in overcoming these challenges.

In this book, we will teach you how to build your own lab and perform profound digital forensic investigations, which originate from a large range of platforms and systems, with the help of Python. We will start with common Windows and Linux desktop machines, then move forward to cloud and virtualization platforms, and end up with mobile phones. We will not only show you how to examine the data at rest or in transit, but also take a deeper look at the volatile memory.

Python provides an excellent development platform to build your own investigative tools because of its decreased complexity, increased efficiency, large number of third-party libraries, and it's also easy to read and write. During the journey of reading this book, you will not only learn how to use the most common Python libraries and extensions to analyze the evidence, but also how to write your own scripts and helper tools to work faster on the cases or incidents with a huge amount of evidence that has to be analyzed.

Let's begin our journey of mastering Python forensics by setting up our lab environment, followed by a brief introduction of the Python ctypes.

If you have already worked with Python ctypes and have a working lab environment, feel free to skip the first chapter and start directly with one of the other chapters. After the first chapter, the other chapters are fairly independent of each other and can be read in any order.