Cybersecurity Ops with bash

Preface

What is of the greatest importance in war is extraordinary speed: one cannot afford to neglect opportunity.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In this day and age, the command line is sometimes overlooked. New cybersecurity practitioners may be lured away by tools with flashy graphical interfaces. More-experienced operators may dismiss or underestimate its value. However, the command line provides a wealth of capability and should be part of every practitioner’s toolkit. As an example, the seemingly simple tail command that outputs the last few lines of a specified file is over 2,000 lines of C code. You could create a similar tool using Python or another programming language, but why do so when you can access its capabilities by simply invoking it from the command line?

Additionally, learning how to use the command line for complex tasks gives you a better understanding of the way an operating system functions. The most capable cybersecurity practitioners understand how tools work at a fundamental level, not just how to use them.

Cybersecurity Ops with bash teaches you how to leverage sophisticated Linux commands and the bash shell to enhance your capabilities as a security operator and practitioner. By learning these skills you will be able to rapidly create and prototype complex capabilities with as little as a single line of pipelined commands.

Although the bash shell and the commands we discuss throughout this book originated in the Unix and Linux family of operating systems, ...