Autopilot, Python, and NIST Control

After a thorough examination of the Blue Team side of the Kali Purple family, we grabbed a taste of some of the Red Team aspects in the previous chapter. The reason these are put together in the Purple distribution is because the offensive tools are used to test the defensive tools and provide quality training as well as proof of concept to cybersecurity analysts through penetration testing.

In this chapter, we are going to look at the automation aspect of these penetration testing utilities through a Kali Linux-provided tool called Autopilot. Just as the name suggests, Autopilot is used to automate attacks, which helps to improve the efficiency of penetration testing teams. Through Autopilot, you gain some subtle references to scripting languages – in particular, Python.

We are going to take a peek at the Python scripting language, but not in the manner you might think. This isn’t a learn-to-code training manual and we’...