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)

Automating Web Application Scanning - Part 1

When we talk about web application scanning, there are various attack vectors that come to mind, such as SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, LFI, and RFI. The tool that we might think of when we talk about web application testing is the Burp Suite. In this chapter, we are going to study how we can use Python in order to try and automate web application attack vector detection. We will also look at how Python can be used to automate Burp scanning in order to cover the vulnerabilities that we would otherwise have to discover manually. In this chapter, we are going to look at the following topics:

  • Automating web application scanning with Burp Suite
  • Burp automation with Python
  • SQL injection
  • Automatic detection of SQL injection with Python