Effective Python Penetration Testing

This eBook extract from ‘Effective Python Penetration Testing‘ will concentrate on Chapter 1: Python Scripting Essentials

It will begin by providing you with an overview of Python scripting and penetration testing. You will learn to analyse network traffic by writing Scrapy scripts and will see how to fingerprint web applications with Python libraries such as Scrapy and urllib2.

Moving on, you will find out how to write basic attack scripts, and will develop debugging and reverse engineering skills with Python libraries. Toward the end of the book, you will discover how to utilise cryptography tool kits in Python and how to automate Python tools and libraries.

Material covered in this PDF eBook:

1. Setting up the scripting environment (Mac/Linux/Windows)
2. Installing third-party libraries
3. Working with virtual environments
4. Using virtualenv and virtualwrapper
5. Python Language Essentials
   1. Variables and Types
   2. Strings
   3. Lists
   4. Dictionaries
   5. Networking
   6. Handing Exceptions in Python

Extract:

“Python being a scripting language, security experts have preferred Python as a language to develop security toolkits. Its human-readable code, modular design and large number of libraries provide a start for security experts and researchers to create sophisticated tools with it. Python comes with a vast library (standard library) which accommodates almost everything, from simple I/O to platform – specific API calls. Many of the default and user-contributed libraries and modules can help us in penetration testing with building tools to achieve interesting tasks.”