Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is easy to learn and extensible programming language that allows any manner of secret agent to work with a variety of data. Agents from beginners to seasoned veterans will benefit from Python's simplicity and sophistication. The standard library provides numerous packages that move beyond simple beginner missions. The Python ecosystem of related packages and libraries supports deep information processing. This book will guide you through the process of upgrading your Python-based toolset for intelligence gathering, analysis, and communication. You'll explore the ways Python is used to analyze web logs to discover the trails of activities that can be found in web and database servers. We'll also look at how we can use Python to discover details of the social network by looking at the data available from social networking websites. Finally, you'll see how to extract history from PDF files, which opens up new sources of data, and you’ll learn about the ways you can gather data using an Arduino-based sensor device.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)
6
Index

Summary

We've upgraded our toolkit in order to include the latest release of Python 3.4 (and even Python 3.5). We've upgraded Beautiful Soup, as well as added the Twitter API, PDFMiner 3K, and PySerial. This will give us the kind of tools that are required to gather and process a wide variety of information. We can even start building our own specialized gadgets based on the Arduino board.

In the next chapter, we'll start with some missions that will exploit our new Python 3.4 tools. We'll examine some foundational data gathering techniques. We'll look at how examining web server logs can reveal patterns of access. This is a kind of big data application since a busy web server can enjoy a lot of traffic.