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)

Libraries

Libraries, or modules, expedite the development process, making it easier to focus on the intended purpose of our script rather than developing everything from scratch. External libraries can save large amounts of developing time and, if we're being honest, they are often more accurate and efficient than any code we, as developers, can cobble together during investigations. There are two categories of libraries: standard and third-party. Standard libraries are distributed with every installation of Python and carry commonly used code that's supported by the Python Software Foundation. The number and names of the standard libraries vary between Python versions, especially as you move between Python 2 and Python 3. We will do our best to call out when a library is imported or used differently between Python 2 and 3. In the other category, third-party libraries...