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)

W3af scanner vulnerabilities in web applications

W3af is the acronym for web application attack and audit framework, and is an open source vulnerabilities scanner that it can be used for auditing web security.

W3af overview

W3af is a security audit tool for web applications, it is divided into several modules, such as Attack, Audit, Exploit, Discovery, Evasion and Brute Force. These modules in W3af come with several secondary modules as, for example, we can select the XSS option in the Audit module if we need to test Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the web application, assuming that it is necessary to perform a certain Audit.

The main feature of W3af is that its audit system is based entirely on plugins written...