Black Hat Python

Chapter 2. The Network: Basics

The network is and always will be the sexiest arena for a hacker. An attacker can do almost anything with simple network access, such as scan for hosts, inject packets, sniff data, remotely exploit hosts, and much more. But if you are an attacker who has worked your way into the deepest depths of an enterprise target, you may find yourself in a bit of a conundrum: you have no tools to execute network attacks. No netcat. No Wireshark. No compiler and no means to install one. However, you might be surprised to find that in many cases, you’ll find a Python install, and so that is where we will begin.

This chapter will give you some basics on Python networking using the socket^[5] module. Along the way, we’ll build clients, ...