Book Image

Python Penetration Testing Cookbook

By : Rejah Rehim
Book Image

Python Penetration Testing Cookbook

By: Rejah Rehim

Overview of this book

Penetration testing is the use of tools and code to attack a system in order to assess its vulnerabilities to external threats. Python allows pen testers to create their own tools. Since Python is a highly valued pen-testing language, there are many native libraries and Python bindings available specifically for pen-testing tasks. Python Penetration Testing Cookbook begins by teaching you how to extract information from web pages. You will learn how to build an intrusion detection system using network sniffing techniques. Next, you will find out how to scan your networks to ensure performance and quality, and how to carry out wireless pen testing on your network to avoid cyber attacks. After that, we’ll discuss the different kinds of network attack. Next, you’ll get to grips with designing your own torrent detection program. We’ll take you through common vulnerability scenarios and then cover buffer overflow exploitation so you can detect insecure coding. Finally, you’ll master PE code injection methods to safeguard your network.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Changing the user agent

Many websites use a user agent string to identify the browser and serve it accordingly. As we are using urllib to access the website, it won't recognize this user agent and may behave in strange ways or fail. So, in this case, we could specify the user agent for our requests.

How to do it...

We use custom user agent string in the request as following:

  1. First, import the required modules:
>>> import urllib.request  
  1. Then define the user agent we plan to specify for the request:
>>> user_agent = ' Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0'  
  1. Set up the headers for the request:
>>> headers = {'User-Agent': user_agent...