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)

Vulnerability Scanner Python - Part 1

When we talk of port scanning, the tool that automatically comes to mind is Nmap. Nmap has a good reputation and it is arguably the best open source port scanner available. It has tons of features that allow you to carry out a wide variety of scans over the network to discover what hosts are alive, what ports are open, and also which services and service versions are running on the host. It also has an engine (the Nmap scanning engine) that can scan NSE scripts, that is used to discover common vulnerabilities with the running services. In this chapter, we will make use of Python in order to automate the process of port scanning. This chapter will form the basis for our automated vulnerability scanner, and will supplement the subsequent chapter, which will focus on automating service scanning and enumeration.

This chapter covers the following...