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

Chapter 3: Reconnaissance and Information Gathering

In this chapter, we will learn about the basics of networking. Without having a solid understanding of computer networks, you will not be able to go very far in the field of penetration testing and ethical hacking. We will cover some basic details about how networking works. We will also take a look at the different abstraction layers in networking and the role of each layer.

Every ethical hacking process starts with gathering relevant information about the target, and this chapter is dedicated to what type of information we can obtain and how this information can be useful to us. We will discuss the standard OSI model that's used to describe the network layers and how this model can be helpful for us. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is a computer network?
  • Classifying networks
  • Network stack
  • Network entities
  • Protection
  • Changing MAC