Hello everyone.
My name is Mike Woolard,
and welcome to my new course looking at an introduction to Python
functions and libraries for cybersecurity. We're going to explore
some of the more common libraries, packages,
functions, and methods of Python that cybersecurity
personnel can utilize to build tools, monitor networks,
respond to incidents, and pen test the environment they work within.
There are currently over 600,000 unfilled cybersecurity
positions in the United States alone. Teams are understaffed in
a department that can't afford to miss.
Being able to supplement skills with tools and automation is almost a necessity.
The teams cannot be everywhere, look at everything, and do it around the clock.
So, why Python? Well,
Python is considered to be a friendly language for
beginners as there is a focus on readability,
making it easier to understand and use. Its syntax has
similarities with the English language,
making it easy for novice programmers to leap into the world of development.
This is important because most professionals in security
probably did not start out as a developer.
We're simply looking for an easy and powerful way to automate jobs through
scripts. And because we don't work in a bubble, our scripts must touch the
full stack, Windows, Linux, Macs, UNIX, or if your organization is building
Android and iOS apps or are built with .NET, PHP, Java or any of the other
dozens of languages out there.
These all present their own challenges, but the beautiful thing is
Python is multiplatform and works across them all and, in fact, comes
preinstalled on Macs and Linux or is a simple install in Windows,
which we'll demonstrate here later.
We're only as effective as the tools at our disposal.
Python, being open source, solves a few very important problems.
It is easy and free to implement.
You don't need to spend thousands of dollars to solve basic problems.
I mean, security is complicated enough. We are at an
inherent disadvantage to the attackers.
We have to help each other out so we're not constantly trying to reinvent
the wheel. If there is a tool that gets you close to a solution, but because
of a nuance in the business requires a tweak in the code, Python, being the
open and easy‑to‑understand language that it is, can easily take an
off‑the‑shelf tool and fork it,
allowing your company to customize it to your problem.
Now to build off that, thinking you have to write everything
from scratch is the hardest part of coding. For people who do
not code for a living every day,
who do not live the software engineering life, writing even
just scripts seems like a daunting task.
Luckily, Python has a standard library with hundreds of functions,
and in true open source fashion, there are hundreds of packages
with thousands of more functions that allow you to quickly solve
many problems very quickly.
In this course, we're going to cover some functions I see as being
important to the information security field. I will also provide as
attachments to this course a list of other packages,
tools, and methods we are not able to get to,
but you may find useful to research on your own.
So that is my take on why Python is important to this field.
In the next clip,
we're going to talk through some of the examples of how it is useful.