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)

Mastering our final iteration – bitcoin_address_lookup.py

In the final iteration, we'll write the output of our script to a CSV file rather than the console. This allows examiners to quickly filter and sort data in a manner conducive to analysis.

On line 4, we've imported the csv module that's a part of the standard library. Writing to a CSV file is fairly simple compared with other output formats, and most examiners are very comfortable with manipulating spreadsheets.

As mentioned previously in this chapter, in this final iteration of our script, we've added the necessary logic to detect whether Python 2 or Python 3 is being used to call the script. Depending on the version of Python, the appropriate urllib or urllib2 functions are imported into this script. Note that we directly import the function, urlopen(), and URLError, which we plan to use so...