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)

Additional challenges

You've created a script that implements the spamsum algorithm to generate ssdeep compatible hashes! With this, there are a few additional challenges to pursue.

First, we're providing six sample files, found in the previously mentioned test_data/ directory. These files are available to confirm you're getting the same hashes as those printed and to allow you to perform some additional testing. The file_1, file_2, and file_3 files are our originals, whereas the instances with an appended a are a modified version of the original. The accompanying README.md file contains a description of the alterations we performed, though in short, we have the following:

  • file_1 with a relocation of some file content to a later portion of the file
  • file_2 with an insertion in the early portion of the file
  • file_3 with a removal of the start of the file

We encourage...