Book Image

Python for Security and Networking - Third Edition

By : José Ortega
4 (2)
Book Image

Python for Security and Networking - Third Edition

4 (2)
By: José Ortega

Overview of this book

Python’s latest updates add numerous libraries that can be used to perform critical security-related missions, including detecting vulnerabilities in web applications, taking care of attacks, and helping to build secure and robust networks that are resilient to them. This fully updated third edition will show you how to make the most of them and improve your security posture. The first part of this book will walk you through Python scripts and libraries that you’ll use throughout the book. Next, you’ll dive deep into the core networking tasks where you will learn how to check a network’s vulnerability using Python security scripting and understand how to check for vulnerabilities in your network – including tasks related to packet sniffing. You’ll also learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages along with writing forensics scripts. The next part of the book will show you a variety of modern techniques, libraries, and frameworks from the Python ecosystem that will help you extract data from servers and analyze the security in web applications. You’ll take your first steps in extracting data from a domain using OSINT tools and using Python tools to perform forensics tasks. By the end of this book, you will be able to make the most of Python to test the security of your network and applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Python Environment and System Programming Tools
4
Section 2: Network Scripting and Packet Sniffing with Python
8
Section 3: Server Scripting and Port Scanning with Python
12
Section 4: Server Vulnerabilities and Security in Web Applications
16
Section 5: Python Forensics
20
Assessments – Answers to the End-of-Chapter Questions
21
Other Books You May Enjoy
22
Index

Discovering services and vulnerabilities with Nmap scripts

In this section, we will learn how to discover services as well as perform advanced operations to collect information about a target and detect vulnerabilities in the FTP service.

Executing Nmap scripts to discover services

Nmap is an exceptional tool for performing network and service scans, but among its numerous features there are some very notable ones, such as the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE).

Nmap lets you perform vulnerability scans thanks to its powerful Lua scripting engine. In this way, we can also run more complex routines that let us filter information about a specific target.

Nmap provides several scripts that can help to identify services with the possibility to exploit found vulnerabilities. Each of these scripts can be called using the –script option:

  • Auth: Executes all available scripts for authentication
  • Default: Executes the basic scripts of the tool by default
  • ...