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)

Scrapy shell

Scrapy shell is a command-line interface that helps to debug scripts without running the entire crawler. We have to provide a URL, and Scrapy shell will open up an interface to interact with objects that the spider handles in its callbacks, such as a response object.

How to do it...

We can go through some simple usage of Scrapy's interactive shell. The steps are as follows:

  1. Open up a Terminal window and type the following command:
$ Scrapy shell http://books.toscrape.com/  

After loading the Scrapy shell, it will open up an interface to interact with the response object as follows:

  1. We can use this interface to debug the selectors for the response object:
>>> response.xpath('//ol/li/article...