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)

Data manipulation and parsing with XML, JSON, and CSV data

In this section, we will first look at how we can manipulate XML data in Python followed by how we can manipulate JSON data. After that, we will look at the pandas Python utility with a focus on CSV.

XML data manipulation

In this section, we will look at how can we manipulate XML data in Python. While there are many ways to parse XML documents in Python, the simple and the most widely used method is using the XML.etree module. Let's see the following example, which will illustrate how easy and simple it is to parse XML documents and strings in Python. Create a script called xml_parser.py. We will use an XML document called exmployees.xml:

As can be seen in the...