Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing with Python

By : Furqan Khan
Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing with Python

By: Furqan Khan

Overview of this book

With the current technological and infrastructural shift, penetration testing is no longer a process-oriented activity. Modern-day penetration testing demands lots of automation and innovation; the only language that dominates all its peers is Python. Given the huge number of tools written in Python, and its popularity in the penetration testing space, this language has always been the first choice for penetration testers. Hands-On Penetration Testing with Python walks you through advanced Python programming constructs. Once you are familiar with the core concepts, you’ll explore the advanced uses of Python in the domain of penetration testing and optimization. You’ll then move on to understanding how Python, data science, and the cybersecurity ecosystem communicate with one another. In the concluding chapters, you’ll study exploit development, reverse engineering, and cybersecurity use cases that can be automated with Python. By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired adequate skills to leverage Python as a helpful tool to pentest and secure infrastructure, while also creating your own custom exploits.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Report parsers

A report parser is a piece of code written in order to parse a report or a file. The files under discussion in this case are Nessus and Nmap files. The detailed description and functionality of each are covered in the following sections.

Nmap parser

Nmap produces outputs in various formats (text, CSV, and XML). In this section, we are going to learn how we can quickly and easily parse Nmap report files in XML format. There are two approaches we can use to do this:

  • The first approach is to build a parser from scratch and employ the same concepts that we discussed in Chapter 4, Advanced Python Modules, which focused on XML parsing.
  • The second and recommended approach is to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Always...