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Coding For Incident Response: Solving the Language Dilemma

Coding For Incident Response: Solving the Language Dilemma (PDF, 2.70MB)Published: 28 Jul, 2015
Created by:
Shelly Giesbrecht

Incident responders frequently are faced with the reality of 'doing more with less' due to budget or manpower deficits. The ability to write scripts from scratch or modify the code of others to solve a problem or find data in a data 'haystack' are necessary skills in a responder's personal toolkit. The question for IR practitioners is what language should they learn that will be the most useful in their work? In this paper, we will examine several coding languages used in writing tools and scripts used for incident response including Perl, Python, C#, PowerShell and Go. In addition, we will discuss why one language may be more helpful than another depending on the use-case, and look at examples of code for each language.