Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security

By : José Ortega
Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security

By: José Ortega

Overview of this book

It’s becoming more and more apparent that security is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure. A data breach is a major security incident, usually carried out by just hacking a simple network line. Increasing your network’s security helps step up your defenses against cyber attacks. Meanwhile, Python is being used for increasingly advanced tasks, with the latest update introducing many new packages. This book focuses on leveraging these updated packages to build a secure network with the help of Python scripting. This book covers topics from building a network to the different procedures you need to follow to secure it. You’ll first be introduced to different packages and libraries, before moving on to different ways to build a network with the help of Python scripting. Later, you will learn how to check a network’s vulnerability using Python security scripting, and understand how to check vulnerabilities in your network. As you progress through the chapters, you will also learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages along with writing forensic scripts. By the end of this book, you will be able to get the most out of the Python language to build secure and robust networks that are resilient to attacks.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Building an HTTP Client with urllib2

In this section, we will learn how to use urllib2 and how we can build HTTP clients with that module.

Introduction to urllib2

urllib2 can read data from a URL using various protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, or Gopher. This module provides urlopen function used to create an object similar to a file with which can to read from the URL. This object has methods such as read(), readline(), readlines(), and close(), which work exactly the same as in the file objects, although in reality we are working with a wrapper that abstracts us from using a socket at low level.

The read method, as you will remember, is used to read the complete "file" or the number of bytes specified as a...