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

Installing virtual OSes

We will need one OS to be used as an attack machine and one to be used as a target machine. In practical cases, most of the time, the attack machine is mostly a Linux distribution-based system and the target/victim machine will be a Windows-based system. We will use the term target and victim interchangeably throughout this book.

Attack machine OS

There are a lot of options for a pen testing machine. However, there are a few Linux-based distributions that stand out:

  • Kali Linux
  • Parrot OS

There are other options as well. However, I recommend using Kali Linux, since it's stable and widely used for pen testing. Kali has a lot of tools preconfigured, which can save a lot of time.

Kali Linux

To download a virtual image for Kali Linux, go to Kali's download page: https://www.kali.org/downloads/.

Let's begin the installation process:

  1. In the Download section, select Kali Linux 64-bit VirtualBox. This is a complete...