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

Introduction to Scapy

In order to create a network scanner, we will use a Python networking library called Scapy. This library is designed to send, sniff, dissect, and edit network packets. Scapy is a very powerful network packet manipulation tool. To read more about the tool, you can go to the following link: https://scapy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html.

Installing Scapy

To install Scapy, first open the terminal. Let's understand a few things first. In Linux, there are two user privileges, user and root, and the environment for both users is different. Higher privileges are required for system-level commands. To send and receive packets, we will need to install Scapy as a root user as well as a normal user. We will write our program as a normal user and when we run it, we will run it as root as sending packets requires higher privileges in Linux (you can think of it as the Run as Administrator equivalent in Windows). You will see what I mean in a moment. To...