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)

Colorama

The colorama module (version 0.4.1) allows us to easily create colored Terminal text. We're going to use this to highlight good and bad events to the user. For example, when a plugin completes without errors, we display that with a green font. Similarly, we will print encountered errors in red. The colorama module can be installed with pip:

pip install colorama==0.4.1  

Traditionally, printing colored text to the Terminal is achieved by a series of escape characters on Linux or macOS systems. This, however, won't work for Windows operating systems. The following are examples of ANSI escape characters being used to create colored text in Linux or macOS Terminals:

The color format is the escape character, \033, followed by an open bracket and then the desired color code. We can change the background color in addition to the foreground color and even do both at...