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)

Accessing the Nessus API with Python

In this section, we review python modules for interacting with the Nessus Vulnerabilities scanner.

Installing the nessrest Python module

Nessus provides an API to access it programmatically from Python. Tenable provides a REST API that we can use any library that allows HTTP requests. We also have the possibility to use specific libraries in Python, such as nessrest: https://github.com/tenable/nessrest.

To use this module in our Python script, import it as we did for other modules after installation. We can install the nessrest module with pip:

$ pip install nessrest

If we try to build the project from the github source code, the dependencies can be satisfied via

pip install -r requirements...