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)

Reading pcap files with scapy

In this section, you will learn the basics for reading pcap files. PCAP (Packet CAPture) refers to the API that allows you to capture network packets for processing. The PCAP format is a standard and is used by practically all network-analysis tools, such as TCPDump, WinDump, Wireshark, TShark, and Ettercap.

Introduction to the PCAP format

By analogy, the information captured using this technique is stored in a file with the .pcap extension. This file contains frames and network packets and is very useful if we need to save the result of a network analysis for later processing.

These files are very useful if we need to save the result of a network analysis for later processing or as evidence of...