Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By : Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics - Second Edition

By: Preston Miller, Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

Digital forensics plays an integral role in solving complex cybercrimes and helping organizations make sense of cybersecurity incidents. This second edition of Learning Python for Forensics illustrates how Python can be used to support these digital investigations and permits the examiner to automate the parsing of forensic artifacts to spend more time examining actionable data. The second edition of Learning Python for Forensics will illustrate how to develop Python scripts using an iterative design. Further, it demonstrates how to leverage the various built-in and community-sourced forensics scripts and libraries available for Python today. This book will help strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. By the end of this book, you will build a collection of Python scripts capable of investigating an array of forensic artifacts and master the skills of extracting metadata and parsing complex data structures into actionable reports. Most importantly, you will have developed a foundation upon which to build as you continue to learn Python and enhance your efficacy as an investigator.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Challenge

There are a few directions in which we could take this script. As we've already mentioned, there's a great deal of potentially useful data that we aren't writing out to a file. It might be useful to store the entire dictionary structure in a JSON file so that others can easily import and manipulate the data. This would allow us to utilize the parsed structure in a separate program and create additional reports from it.

Another useful feature we could develop is a timeline report or graphic for the user. This report would list the current contents of each record and then show a progression from the current contents of the records to their older versions or even non-existing records. A tree-diagram or flowchart might be a good means of visualizing change for a particular database record.

Finally, add in a function that supports processing of varint that...