Book Image

Python Ethical Hacking from Scratch

By : Fahad Ali Sarwar
Book Image

Python Ethical Hacking from Scratch

By: Fahad Ali Sarwar

Overview of this book

Penetration testing enables you to evaluate the security or strength of a computer system, network, or web application that an attacker can exploit. With this book, you'll understand why Python is one of the fastest-growing programming languages for penetration testing. You'll find out how to harness the power of Python and pentesting to enhance your system security. Developers working with Python will be able to put their knowledge and experience to work with this practical guide. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, this book takes a hands-on approach to help you build your own pentesting tools for testing the security level of systems and networks. You'll learn how to develop your own ethical hacking tools using Python and explore hacking techniques to exploit vulnerabilities in networks and systems. Finally, you'll be able to get remote access to target systems and networks using the tools you develop and modify as per your own requirements. By the end of this ethical hacking book, you'll have developed the skills needed for building cybersecurity tools and learned how to secure your systems by thinking like a hacker.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Nuts and Bolts of Ethical Hacking – The Basics
4
Section 2: Thinking Like a Hacker – Network Information Gathering and Attacks
8
Section 3: Malware Development

Building a keylogger file transfer

We have already learned how to send and receive very basic data in the program we developed in Chapter 6, Malware Development. In this chapter, we will try to send and receive files from one PC to another, first from the victim's PC to the hacker's PC, and then from the hacker's to the victim's PC. This will give us access to any sensitive files present on the victim's PC. For example, let's say that the victim has stored their passwords in a file present on their PC (which is a very bad idea; never store your passwords in a plain text file on your PC); then we can simply read the contents of the file and send it to the hacker. Let's see how this works.

Downloading the victim file to the hacker

Here, we will modify the program we developed in Chapter 6, Malware Development, where we ran Windows commands to add functionality for file transfer (see the Creating malware section). First, we will add a download...