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)

Introduction to Python

This chapter will provide an introduction to Python, focusing primarily on data types, variables, expressions, and program structures that the Python programming language follows. The objective of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with the basics of Python so that they can use it in the upcoming chapters. The chapter will cover the installation of Python and its dependency manager. We will also start taking a look at scripting in Python.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • An introduction to Python (including its installation and setup)
  • Basic data types
  • Sequence data types – lists, dictionaries, tuples
  • Variables and keywords
  • Operations and expressions