Python was named after the British comedy troupe “Monty Python;” it is a general-purpose and high-level language. Guido Van Rossum of CWI created Python to support various programming styles and be fun to use. Monty Python references are often found in its sample code, instructions, and tutorials. Python is primarily used in web applications, software development, and information security. Python has numerous cybersecurity uses, such as host discovery, malware analysis, accessing servers, network scanning, port scanning, sending and decoding packets, and creating scripts to automate tasks and perform data analysis.

When it comes to debugging, utilizing Python enables the programmer to use a minimal amount of code; this allows security professionals to understand what the code does quickly, locate any issues, and effectively secure it. Python even has a built-in debugger, PBD, which is a command-line interface utility. While some other coding languages are often challenging to learn, Python was designed to be simple, free, and open source. One of my favorite features of Python is its memory manager, which allows both users and programmers to spend less time stressing about caching, portioning, and memory allocation.

In a security role, knowing Python is worth its theoretical weight in gold. By creating scripts, a security researcher can simulate attacks and even clone websites to be used as honeypots. Similar to the Nmap exercise we performed recently, the same network port scanning procedure can be run using Python socket programming. Geolocation extraction in Python, using Google APIs and the pygeoip module, can extract the real-time location of an IP address; this is quite handy for those who keep track of their users or those who wish to attempt to penetrate an organization’s defenses. I must admit, I have very little coding experience; however, Python has always been my first stop on the road to programming competence.

References

Simpson, M. T., & Antill, N. (2017). Hands-On Ethical Hacking and Network Defense. Boston, MA. Cengage Learning. Kapoor, Ajay. (2020). Python For CyberSecurity: Why Is It Better In 2020? Retrieved April 12, 2021, from https://www.pixelcrayons.com/blog/python-for-cybersecurity-why-is-it-better-in-2020/#:~:text=Python%20is%20Used%20for%20Developing%20Anything%20in%20CyberSecurity&text=For%20example%2C%20Python%20is%20used,port%20scanning%2C%20and%20network%20scanning