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

What you need for this book

A field agent needs a computer over which they have administrative privileges. We'll be installing additional software. A secret agent without the administrative password may have trouble installing Python 3 or any of the additional packages that we'll be using.

For agents using Windows, most of the packages will come prebuilt using the .EXE installers.

For agents using Linux, developer's tools are required. The complete suite of developer's tools is generally needed. The Gnu C Compiler (GCC) is the backbone of these tools.

For agents using Mac OS X, the developer's tool, XCode, is required and can be found at https://developer.apple.com/xcode/. We'll also need to install a tool called homebrew (http://brew.sh) to help us add Linux packages to Mac OS X.

Python 3 is available from the Python download page at https://www.python.org/download.

We'll download and install several things beyond Python 3.4 itself: