Python Ethical Hacking from Scratch: Think like an ethical hacker, avoid detection, and successfully develop, deploy, detect, and avoid malware

✍ Scribed by Fahad Ali Sarwar

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 214
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Explore the world of practical ethical hacking by developing custom network scanning and remote access tools that will help you test the system security of your organization

Key Features

• Get hands-on with ethical hacking and learn to think like a real-life hacker
• Build practical ethical hacking tools from scratch with the help of real-world examples
• Leverage Python 3 to develop malware and modify its complexities

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Understand the core concepts of ethical hacking
• Develop custom hacking tools from scratch to be used for ethical hacking purposes
• Discover ways to test the cybersecurity of an organization by bypassing protection schemes
• Develop attack vectors used in real cybersecurity tests
• Test the system security of an organization or subject by identifying and exploiting its weaknesses
• Gain and maintain remote access to target systems
• Find ways to stay undetected on target systems and local networks

Who this book is for

If you want to learn ethical hacking by developing your own tools instead of just using the prebuilt tools, this book is for you. A solid understanding of fundamental Python concepts is expected. Some complex Python concepts are explained in the book, but the goal is to teach ethical hacking, not Python.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and What it means to be a hacker
2. Getting started - Setting up lab environment and tools required
3. Reconnaissance and information gathering
4. Network scanning - Discovering targets
5. Network attacks - Man in the middle attack
6. Malware development - Creating your own malware
7. Advanced malware
8. Post exploitation
9. Protection - How to avoid detection

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
Table of Contents
Preface
Section 1: The Nuts and Bolts of Ethical Hacking – The Basics
Chapter 1: Introduction to Hacking
What's all the fuss about hackers?
What is hacking?
Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability
Becoming a successful hacker
Legality
Types of hackers
White hat hackers
Black hat hackers
Gray hat hackers
Nation-state hackers
Corporate spies
Hacktivists
Script kiddies
Hacking phases and methodology
Planning
Reconnaissance
Scanning
Identifying weaknesses
Attacking and gaining access
Maintaining access
Post exploitation
Covering tracks
Reporting
Careers in cybersecurity
Systems security administration
Security architect
Penetration tester
Forensic analyst
Chief information security officer
Types of attacks
System control
Social engineering
Baiting
Phishing
Summary
Chapter 2: Getting Started – Setting Up a Lab Environment
Technical requirements
Setting up VirtualBox
Installing virtual OSes
Attack machine OS
Installing Python
Installing Python on Windows
Installing Python on Kali Linux
Integrated development environment
Setting up networking
Updating Kali
Using virtual environments
Summary
Section 2: Thinking Like a Hacker – Network Information Gathering and Attacks
Chapter 3: Reconnaissance and Information Gathering
What is a computer network?
Components of a basic computer network
Node
Server
Transmission media
Network interface card
Hub
Switch
Router
Gateway
Firewall
Classifying network
Local area network
Personal area network
Metropolitan area networks
Wide area network
Internet
Network stack
Introduction to OSI model
Complete cycle
TCP/IP model
Mapping the OSI and TCP/IP stack
Network entities
Private IP address
IPv4 versus IPv6
MAC address
Ports
Protection
Changing our MAC address
Creating a Python script
Summary
Chapter 4: Network Scanning
Introduction to networking
Data representation in digital systems
Data encapsulation
The packet delivery process
Introduction to Scapy
Installing Scapy
Understanding how Scapy works
Network scanner using Scapy
Address Resolution Protocol
ARP scanner using Scapy
Summary
Chapter 5: Man in the Middle Attacks
Why do we need ARP?
ARP poisoning
Building an ARP spoof program
Arp spoof project
Monitoring traffic
Encrypted traffic
Restoring ARP tables manually
Decrypting the network traffic
HTTPS versus HTTP
Bypassing HTTPS
Summary
Section 3: Malware Development
Chapter 6: Malware Development
Understanding RATs
Forward shell
Reverse shell
Socket programming in Python
Sockets
Creating a socket in Python
socket.socket() API
socket.bind() API
socket.listen() API
socket.accept() API
socket.connect()
socket.send()
Socket.recv()
socket.close()
Fitting it altogether
Creating malware
Hacker server
Victim's client
Running commands remotely on the victim's machine
Navigating directories
Summary
Chapter 7: Advanced Malware
Building a keylogger file transfer
Downloading the victim file to the hacker
Uploading files to the victim
Taking screenshots
Keylogger
Summary
Chapter 8: Post Exploitation
Packaging the malware
Understanding the pyinstaller library
Understanding trojans
Adding an icon to an executable
Creating your own trojan
Attack over a public IP
Cracking passwords
Stealing passwords
Creating botnets
Summary
Chapter 9: System Protection and Perseverance
Persistence system protection
Intrusion detection systems
IDS detection mechanisms
Bypassing an IDS
Persistence
Summary
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