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

Introducing OWASP ZAP as an automated security testing tool

OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is a web application scanner, a flagship project developed and maintained by the OWASP foundation. This tool provides a wide range of features for penetration testing and security analysis and claims to be the world’s most used tool for web application vulnerability testing. ZAP is an open-source project available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. You can get the last version from https://www.zaproxy.org/download/.

Figure 9.18: OWASP ZAP installers

If you are working on a Linux-based operating system, you could download the following file, https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy/releases/download/v2.12.0/ZAP_2.12.0_Linux.tar.gz, and unzip the tar.gz file in your computer. When you unzip it, you’ll get the following file structure:

$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 2 linux linux    4096  2 de gen.   1970 db
-rw-r--r-- 1 linux linux   10488 26 de gen.  20:39 hs_err_pid436060...