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 2: Getting Started – Setting Up a Lab Environment

Before we start going into the details of how to start ethical hacking, we need to configure a couple of things. In this section, we will learn what tools are needed to complete this book. Most of the tools we will be using in this book are available for free.

We will start by selecting the Python version used in this book. Then, we will shift our focus to the Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) used in this book. We will also learn how to set up virtual environments and understand how they can be useful. Later, we will dive into selecting Operating Systems (OSes) both for the attacker as well as the target/victim. We will explore different OSes and finally settle on the ones we will use in this book. We will also test a sample Python script at the end to check that everything is configured properly and see whether we are good to go.

In this chapter, we'll go through the following topics:

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