Book Image

Effective Python Penetration Testing

By : Rejah Rehim
Book Image

Effective Python Penetration Testing

By: Rejah Rehim

Overview of this book

Penetration testing is a practice of testing a computer system, network, or web application to find weaknesses in security that an attacker can exploit. Effective Python Penetration Testing will help you utilize your Python scripting skills to safeguard your networks from cyberattacks. We will begin by providing you with an overview of Python scripting and penetration testing. You will learn to analyze network traffic by writing Scapy scripts and will see how to fingerprint web applications with Python libraries such as ProxMon and Spynner. Moving on, you will find out how to write basic attack scripts, and will develop debugging and reverse engineering skills with Python libraries. Toward the end of the book, you will discover how to utilize cryptography toolkits in Python and how to automate Python tools and libraries.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Effective Python Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Web application fingerprinting


Web application fingerprinting is the main part of the information gathering stage in security assessment. It helps us to accurately identify an application and to pinpoint known vulnerabilities. This also allows us to customize payload or exploitation techniques based on the information. The simplest method is to open the site in the browser and look at its source code for specific keywords. Similarly, with Python, we can download the page and then run some basic regular expressions, which can give you the results.

We can download the website with the urllib/requests module in combination with BeautifulSoup or lxml, as we discussed in this chapter.