Python Forensics – Search

Search is undoubtedly one of the pillars of forensic investigation. Today, search is only as effective as the investigator’s ability to run it through evidence.

Searching for keywords in information plays a crucial role in forensics, especially when searching for evidence with the help of keywords. Knowing what to search for in a specific file and what to search for in deleted files requires experience and knowledge.

Python has various built-in mechanisms and standard library modules to support search operations. Fundamentally, investigators use search operations to find answers to questions such as “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and so on.

Example

In the following example, we declare two strings. We then use the find function to check if the first string contains the second string.

# Searching a particular word from a message
str1 = "This is a string example for Computational forensics of gathering evidence!";
str2 = "string";

print str1.find(str2)
print str1.find(str2, 10)
print str1.find(str2, 40)

The above script will produce the following output.

The “find” function in Python helps in searching for a specific keyword within a message or paragraph. This is crucial for gathering appropriate evidence.