Black Hat Python
When it comes to creating powerful and effective hacking tools, Python is the language of choice for most security analysts. But just how does the magic happen? In Black Hat Python, the latest from Justin Seitz (author of the best-selling Gray Hat Python), you’ll explore the darker side of Python’s capabilities—writing network sniffers, manipulating packets, infecting virtual machines, creating stealthy trojans, and more. You’ll learn how to: –Create a trojan command-and-control using GitHub –Detect sandboxing and automate common malware tasks, like keylogging and screenshotting –Escalate Windows privileges with creative process control –Use offensive memory forensics tricks to retrieve password hashes and inject shellcode into a virtual machine –Extend the popular Burp Suite web-hacking tool –Abuse Windows COM automation to perform a man-in-the-browser attack –Exfiltrate data from a network most sneakily Insider techniques and creative challenges throughout show you how to extend the hacks and how to write your own exploits. When it comes to offensive security, your ability to create powerful tools on the fly is indispensable. Learn how in Black Hat Python. Uses Python 2
Stats for nerds
7recommend
12mentions
11people
2015–2024years
58% recommend42% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Black Hat Python, along with RTFM: Red Team Field Manual; are excellent resources for binpacking your brain with some simple effective uses of tools to serve a need.
I don't feel the same about this book.
Python is pretty ubiquitous, and RTFM focuses on oneliners and easily composable programs with utilities that already exist on target systems.
A lot of what makes Red Team work harder is the need for portability, which pushes people to need to learn lots of interpreted languages and OS internals.
My memory of using Rust for interop with the OS, is syscalls in win32 api; which consumed the better part of a couple weeks to get right, and required the use of unsafe, a lot.
- I'll just add to what others have already provided.
Highly recommend those NoStarch books. Of course, depends what you want to pentest, but this is good general information to get started.- "Black Hat Go" - https://nostarch.com/blackhatgo - "Black Hat Python" - https://nostarch.com/blackhatpython - "Web Security for Developers" - https://nostarch.com /websecurity - "Cracking Codes with Python" - https://nostarch.com/crackingcodes - Ubuntu Security Podcast is a weekly podcast discussing the latest updates and developments from the Ubuntu Security Team. It discusses the weekly bug fixes the team implement which might interest you if you're technical enough. I'm not, and what I like about it is the chattier discussions between the two hosts.
In this episode Joe and Alex discuss their recommended reading list for infosec beginners and practitioners. This section starts at 10:17.
- Red Team Field Manual | Ben Clark - Head First Programming - Linux System Administrators Handbook | Nemeth, et al - Robert Seacord’s Secure Coding in C/C++ - CERT Resilience Management Model (CERT-RMM) - The Code Book | Simon Singh - The Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection | Richard Bejtlich - The Cuckoos Egg | Cliff Stoll - Linux Pro Magazine - Black Hat Python | Justin Seitz - Hacking: The Art Of Exploitation | Jon Erickson - How Google Works
- Gives interesting insights in the healthy values at Google.
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
- Interesting discussions about correct/incorrect interpretations of data/statistics.
Black Hat Python
- Gives short code examples of what can be possible to do.
Programming Collective Intelligence
- Outdated but very inspiring hands on examples of ML in Python
- Thanks for the link! I will definitely have to listen to this later. Black Hat Python and Grey Hat Python are great cookbooks and references for learning offensive Python skills, and I've used both books quite a bit to help others learn Python for security.
- I just finished up Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari -- which, while not groundbreaking, was supremely interesting and readable. If you like Aziz's standup, it's basically him playing sociologist for 200 pages.
Right now I'm going back and forth between Black Hat Python (because I owe it to myself to at least learn a little bit of this stuff) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Carver. Two totally separate ends of the spectrum, but they're both great.
