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

Summary

In this chapter, we understood what vulnerabilities are. We then learned about the Nessus and OpenVAS vulnerability scanners and the reporting tools that they give us for reporting the vulnerabilities that we find in the servers and web applications we scan. Also, we covered how to use these scanners programmatically with Python, with the nessrest and python-gvm modules.

The tools we covered in this chapter use different protocols to generate requests to determine which services are running on a remote host or on the host itself. Therefore, equipped with these tools, you can now identify different security risks both in one system and in various systems on a network.

In the next chapter, we will identify server vulnerabilities in web applications with tools such as WPScan, which discovers vulnerabilities in and analyzes the security of WordPress sites, and sqlmap, which detects SQL injection vulnerabilities in websites.