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

Network entities

Before proceeding, we will introduce a few network-related concepts that will be used throughout this book. Having prior knowledge of them is essential so that you have a complete understanding of this book.

Private IP address

An internet protocol (IP) address is a unique identifier that identifies a device in a network. An IP address is a 32-bit number. Whenever you connect to a new network, you are either assigned a new IP address by a Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) server or you get an IP address stored in your system configuration if it is available. This is usually called a local/private IP address. More often than not, you will see this address in the form 192.168.1.x.

Important Note about IP Addresses

IP addresses are 32-bit, which means that there are only 2^32 = 4,294,967,295 internet addresses available. The IP address is an old protocol and when it was developed, there were not many internet-connected devices. At the time, 4 billion devices...