Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Overview of this book

Digital forensic analysis is the process of examining and extracting data digitally and examining it. Python has the combination of power, expressiveness, and ease of use that makes it an essential complementary tool to the traditional, off-the-shelf digital forensic tools. This book will teach you how to perform forensic analysis and investigations by exploring the capabilities of various Python libraries. The book starts by explaining the building blocks of the Python programming language, especially ctypes in-depth, along with how to automate typical tasks in file system analysis, common correlation tasks to discover anomalies, as well as templates for investigations. Next, we’ll show you cryptographic algorithms that can be used during forensic investigations to check for known files or to compare suspicious files with online services such as VirusTotal or Mobile-Sandbox. Moving on, you’ll learn how to sniff on the network, generate and analyze network flows, and perform log correlation with the help of Python scripts and tools. You’ll get to know about the concepts of virtualization and how virtualization influences IT forensics, and you’ll discover how to perform forensic analysis of a jailbroken/rooted mobile device that is based on iOS or Android. Finally, the book teaches you how to analyze volatile memory and search for known malware samples based on YARA rules.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Summary


This chapter provided an overview of the domains of network-based forensic investigations and the examples with Dshell and Scapy. We have demonstrated how to search for suspicious HTTP connections (such as file downloads) or how to search for leaked data through the SMB protocol with Dshell. In the second section, we created our own port scanner with the help of Scapy and used it to gather more information about the potentially compromised systems.

After we discussed the areas of forensic algorithms, Windows and Unix systems, as well as the network layer, the following chapter will deal with virtualized systems and hypervisors that are becoming an important part of every company.