• Online, Self-Paced
  • Classroom
Course Description

All security professionals, including penetration testers, forensic analysts, network defenders, security administrators, and incident responders, have one experience in common: CHANGE. Tools, technologies, and threats change constantly, but Python is a simple, user-friendly language that can help you keep pace with change, allowing you to write custom tools and automate tasks to effectively manage and respond to your unique threats.

Whether you are new to coding or have been coding for years, SEC573: Automating Information Security with Python will have you creating programs that make your job easier and your work more efficient. This self-paced course starts from the very beginning, assuming you have no prior experience with or knowledge of programming. We cover all of the essentials of the language up front. If you already know the essentials, you will find that the pyWars lab environment allows advanced developers to quickly accelerate to more advanced material in the course.

Technology, threats, and tools are constantly evolving. If we don't evolve with them, we'll become ineffective and irrelevant, unable to provide the vital defenses our organizations increasingly require. Maybe your chosen Operating System has a new feature that creates interesting forensic artifacts that would be invaluable for your investigation, if only you had a tool to access it. Often for new features and forensic artifacts, no such tool has yet been released. You could try moving your case forward without that evidence or hope that someone creates a tool before the case goes cold...or you can write a tool yourself.

Or perhaps an attacker bypassed your defenses and owned your network months ago. If existing tools were able to find the attack, you wouldn't be in this situation. You are bleeding sensitive data and the time-consuming manual process of finding and eradicating the attacker is costing you money and hurting your organization. The answer is simple if you have the skills: Write tools to automate various aspects of your defenses.

Or, as a penetration tester, you need to evolve as quickly as the threats you are paid to emulate. What do you do when "off-the-shelf" tools and exploits fall short? If you're good, you write your own tool or modify existing capabilities to make them perform as you need.

SEC573 is designed to give you the skills you need for tweaking, customizing, or outright developing your own tools. We put you on the path of creating your own tools, empowering you to better automate the daily routine of today's information security professional and to achieve more value in less time. Again and again, organizations serious about security emphasize their need for skilled tool builders. There is a huge demand for people who can understand a problem and then rapidly develop prototype code to attack or defend against it. Learn Python in-depth with us to become fully weaponized.

You Will Learn How To:

  • Leverage Python to perform routine tasks quickly and efficiently
  • Automate log analysis and packet analysis with file operations, regular expressions, and analysis modules to find evil
  • Develop forensics tools to carve binary data and extract new artifacts
  • Read data from databases and the Windows Registry
  • Interact with websites to collect intelligence
  • Develop UDP and TCP client and server applications
  • Automate system processes and process their output

Learning Objectives

  • Modify existing open-source tools to customize them to meet the needs of your organization.
  • Manipulate log file formats to make them compatible with various log collectors.
  • Write new tools to analyze log files and network packets to identify attackers in your environment.
  • Develop tools that extract otherwise inaccessible forensic artifacts from computer systems of all types.
  • Automate the collection of intelligence information to augment your security from online resources.
  • Automate the extraction of signs of compromise and other forensics data from the Windows Registry and other databases.
  • Write a backdoor that uses exception handling, sockets, process execution, and encryption to provide you with your initial foothold in a target environment. The backdoor will include features such as a port scanner to find an open outbound port, techniques for evading antivirus software and network monitoring, and the ability to embed a payload from tools such as Metasploit.

Framework Connections

The materials within this course focus on the Knowledge Skills and Abilities (KSAs) identified within the Specialty Areas listed below. Click to view Specialty Area details within the interactive National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework.