Having fun while learning about and pivoting into the world of DFIR.
by ogmini
Continuation from Part 2 looking back at my coursework in the Master’s Degree in Digital Forensic Science. In this post, I’ll be talking about DFS-510 Scripting for Digital Forensic.
I want to preface this by acknowledging that I should have consulted with my advisor to see if I could have the course waived. With my background in computer engineering and years of professional programming experience, I still found the course enjoyable, albeit extremely easy. It essentially served as a break for me.
The course mainly centered on Python with a little detour into PowerShell. The actual questions posed for the discussion threads were very shallow and I think this was intentional to allow students to focus more heavily on learning Python and the related assignments. I know a many of the students had some difficulty and made good use of the Q&A section to help each other. Assignments ranged from setting up the Python environment, utilizing and modifying existing Python scripts, to writing our own Python script as a final assignment. We were at least on paper supposed to use WingIDE for our assignments as one of the assignments involved submitting screenshots of the setup. I did my coding in Visual Studio Code but that is personal preference and there is nothing wrong with WingIDE.
The PowerShell section for the course was only one week and in my opinion was too short. Some of the Python modules could be combined to allow for more time to be devoted to PowerShell. There was no discussion or references to any type of versioning or source code repository. I think it would have been a good exercise for the students to setup a GitHub Repository for their final assignment.