Python Digital Forensics Cookbook: Effective Python recipes for digital investigations

Key Features

• Develop code that extracts vital information from everyday forensic acquisitions.
• Increase the quality and efficiency of your forensic analysis.
• Leverage the latest resources and capabilities available to the forensic community.

Book Description

Technology plays an increasingly large role in our daily lives and shows no sign of stopping. Now, more than ever, it is paramount that an investigator develops programming expertise to deal with increasingly large datasets.

By leveraging the Python recipes explored throughout this book, we make the complex simple, quickly extracting relevant information from large datasets. You will explore, develop, and deploy Python code and libraries to provide meaningful results that can be immediately applied to your investigations. Throughout the Python Digital Forensics Cookbook, recipes include topics such as working with forensic evidence containers, parsing mobile and desktop operating system artifacts, extracting embedded metadata from documents and executables, and identifying indicators of compromise. You will also learn to integrate scripts with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) such as VirusTotal and PassiveTotal, and tools such as Axiom, Cellebrite, and EnCase.

By the end of the book, you will have a sound understanding of Python and how you can use it to process artifacts in your investigations.

What you will learn

• Understand how Python can enhance digital forensics and investigations
• Learn to access the contents of, and process, forensic evidence containers
• Explore malware through automated static analysis
• Extract and review message contents from a variety of email formats
• Add depth and context to discovered IP addresses and domains through various Application Program Interfaces (APIs)
• Delve into mobile forensics and recover deleted messages from SQLite databases
• Index large logs into a platform to better query and visualize datasets

About the Author

Preston Miller is a consultant at an internationally recognized risk management firm. He holds an undergraduate degree from Vassar College and a master's degree in Digital Forensics from Marshall University. While at Marshall, Preston unanimously received the prestigious J. Edgar Hoover Foundation's Scientific Scholarship. He is a published author, recently of Learning Python for Forensics, an introductory Python Forensics textbook. Preston is also a member of the GIAC advisory board and holds multiple industry-recognized certifications in his field.

Chapin Bryce works as a consultant in digital forensics, focusing on litigation support, incident response, and intellectual property investigations. After studying computer and digital forensics at Champlain College, he joined a firm leading the field of digital forensics and investigations. In his downtime, Chapin enjoys working on side projects, hiking, and skiing (if the weather permits). As a member of multiple ongoing research and development projects, he has authored several articles in professional and academic publications.

Table of Contents

1. Working with System/File Info
2. A Deep Dive into Mobile Forensics
3. Extracting Embedded Metadata
4. Exploring Networking and Indicators of Compromise
5. Reading Emails and Taking Names
6. Forensic Evidence
7. Log Based Artifacts
8. Exploring Windows Forensic Artifact
9. Exploring Windows Forensic Artifact.
10. Creating Artifact Report