Chapter 8: Python Fundamentals

It’s said that computers are actually very dumb; they crunch numbers and move things around in memory. Despite this oversimplification, how they think can seem mysterious. There is no better way to get acquainted with how computers actually think than through programming. Elsewhere in this book, we’ll see programming languages at different scales—assembly language, the machine code made up of mnemonic operation code (opcode) one up from the bottom; C language, the lowest of the high-level languages; and even Python, the high-level interpreted language. Python has a tremendous number of modules in its standard library that allow a penetration tester (pen tester) to accomplish just about any task. In Chapter 2, Bypassing Network Access Control, we showed how easy it is to use Scapy’s functionality in our own Python script to inject specially crafted packets into the network. One way we can advance as pen testers is by learning...