ForrestCook.net

Projects and posts related to digital forensics. Mostly.

  • Updating programs with duct tape, string and some hope

    As I have written about previously, a warrant builder has been a personal pet project of mine for some time. I was intent on providing a simple way to streamline and provide consistency to what was a messy and varied approach by many in my area. Well, the program was something of a hit and…

  • To Varint or not to varint

    While working through the potato chat BLOBs, I was introduced to the varint concept. Effectively, a varint is a flexible way to communicate positive integers through one or more byte of data, dynamically. Instead of an application always requiring an integer use *one* byte of data to convey a number (and thus being limited from…

  • Potato Chat 2, starchy boogaloo 🥔💬

    Last updated 08/22/2025: In the last post I brought up some behaviors that I was able to test and observe within the potato chat application. While I am not done testing the application’s behaviors (there are many… so many), I have also been attempting to process the various databases and logs to make some meaningful…

  • Potato Chat 🥔💬

    Last updated 04/24/2025: I recently became aware of the “Potato Chat” application, which my tools weren’t supporting. I decided I would take a stab at parsing the unsupported elements from the various databases and log files involved. I’ll give a rundown of the app and then we will dive into the artifacts you can find…

  • Spending hours to save minutes

    I often find myself happily exploring rabbit holes in digital forensics, time discipline is not a strength of mine. So in order to better manage my time and enhance my productivity, the clear choice was to spend (many) hours learning Python to automate some of my day to day activities. The “Case management script” (which…

  • Warrant builder application

    Last Updated: 05/09/2025 Creative names aside – I took it upon myself recently to attempt to streamline the warrant writing process at my agency. This endeavor took place over many months and several iterations as I stumbled forward learning Python and some pertinent libraries. Moving from quality of life automations based on command line inputs…

Digital Forensics and general nerdery. Learning bit by bit (heh) and fighting off imposter syndrome. Learning python, adapting it to my work and overcomplicating simple processes most of the time.