Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security - Second Edition

By : José Ortega
Book Image

Mastering Python for Networking and Security - Second Edition

By: José Ortega

Overview of this book

It’s now more apparent than ever that security is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure, and that devastating data breaches can occur from simple network line hacks. As shown in this book, combining the latest version of Python with an increased focus on network security can help you to level up your defenses against cyber attacks and cyber threats. Python is being used for increasingly advanced tasks, with the latest update introducing new libraries and packages featured in the Python 3.7.4 recommended version. Moreover, most scripts are compatible with the latest versions of Python and can also be executed in a virtual environment. This book will guide you through using these updated packages to build a secure network with the help of Python scripting. You’ll cover a range of topics, from building a network to the procedures you need to follow to secure it. Starting by exploring different packages and libraries, you’ll learn about various ways to build a network and connect with the Tor network through Python scripting. You will also learn how to assess a network's vulnerabilities using Python security scripting. Later, you’ll learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages, along with writing forensic scripts. By the end of this Python book, you’ll be able to use Python to build secure apps using cryptography and steganography techniques.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Python Environment and System Programming Tools
4
Section 2: Network Scripting and Extracting Information from the Tor Network with Python
8
Section 3: Server Scripting and Port Scanning with Python
12
Section 4: Server Vulnerabilities and Security in Python Modules
16
Section 5: Python Forensics

Discovering hidden services with OSINT tools

In this section, you'll learn how to discover hidden services from the Tor network and check the status of a specific onion site. We'll do this by learning how to use certain Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) tools. Let's start with the most basic one: search engines.

Search engines

The Hidden Wiki is the most popular site for finding .onion sites and contains links to many hidden network services. It is an anonymous wiki that works in a similar way to Wikipedia, in which you can add, modify, and in some cases, delete articles and reviews:

Torch is another popular Tor search engine. We must open it through the Tor Browser to look at its results. By doing this, we can find active .onion sites, in a similar way to how other search engines such as Google or Bing get results. You can access Torch using...