Python for Security Analysts & Professionals

Course Objectives

Skills-Focused, Hands-on Learning: This course is about 50% hands-on lab to 50% lecture ratio, combining engaging instructor presentations, demonstrations and discussions with extensive machine-based student labs and practical project work. Although the course is introductory in nature, it will increase in complexity as more sophisticated skills and techniques are introduced. Students can rely on our highly experienced instructors to provide informed, relatable, ‘real-world' answers to their questions.

Working within in an engaging, hands-on learning environment, attendees will learn to use Python to:

• Create working Python scripts following best practices
• Use python data types appropriately
• Read and write files with both text and binary data
• Search and replace text with regular expressions
• Get familiar with the standard library and its work-saving modules
• Use lesser known but powerful Python data types
• Create "real-world", professional Python applications
• Work with dates, times, and calendars
• Know when to use collections such as lists, dictionaries, and sets
• Understand Pythonic features such as comprehensions and iterators
• Write robust code using exception handling
• Optional: Working with RESTful Services

Course Prerequisites

This course is tailored specifically for Security Analysts and others new to Python, who wish to learn and use Python functionality for security-related tasks such as log manipulation or forensics.  Students are required to have some basic programming experience and exposure prior to attending this course. Students should have basic development experience in any programming language, along with a working, user-level knowledge of Unix/Linux, Mac, or Windows.

Course Agenda

Session 1:  An Overview of Python

• What is python?
• 1 -- An overview of Python
• What is python?
• Python Timeline
• Advantages/Disadvantages of Python
• Getting help with pydoc

Session 2:  The Python Environment

• Starting Python
• Using the interpreter
• Running a Python script
• Python scripts on Unix/Windows
• Editors and IDEs

Session 3:  Getting Started

• Using variables
• Builtin functions
• Strings
• Numbers
• Converting among types
• Writing to the screen
• Command line parameters

Session 4: Flow Control

• About flow control
• White space
• Conditional expressions
• Relational and Boolean operators
• While loops
• Alternate loop exits

Session 5: Sequences

• About sequences
• Lists and list methods
• Tuples
• Indexing and slicing
• Iterating through a sequence
• Sequence functions, keywords, and operators
• List comprehensions
• Generator Expressions
• Nested sequences

Session 6:  Working with files

• File overview
• Opening a text file
• Reading a text file
• Writing to a text file
• Reading and writing raw (binary) data
• Converting binary data with struct

Session 7:  Dictionaries and Sets

• About dictionaries
• Creating dictionaries
• Iterating through a dictionary
• About sets
• Creating sets
• Working with sets

Session 8:  Functions

• Defining functions
• Parameters 
• Global and local scope
• Nested functions
• Returning values

Session 9:  Sorting

• The sorted() function
• Alternate keys
• Lambda functions
• Sorting collections

Session 10:  Errors and Exception Handling

• Syntax errors
• Exceptions
• Using try/catch/else/finally
• Handling multiple exceptions
• Ignoring exceptions

Session 11:  Modules and Packages

• The import statement
• Module search path
• Creating modules and Using packages
• Function and Module aliases

Session 12:  Classes

• About o-o programming
• Defining classes
• Constructors
• Methods
• Instance data
• Properties
• Class methods and data

Session 13:  Regular Expressions

• RE syntax overview
• RE Objects
• Searching and matching
• Compilation flags
• Groups and special groups
• Replacing text
• Splitting strings

Session 14:  The standard library

• The sys module
• Launching external programs
• The string module
• Reading CSV data

Session 15:  Dates and times

• Working with dates and times
• Translating timestamps
• Parsing dates from text

Session 16: Working with the file system

• Paths, directories, and filenames
• Checking for existence
• Permissions and other file attributes
• Walking directory trees
• Creating filters with fileinput
• Security and File Access

Session 17: Network services

• Grabbing web content
• Detecting Malformed Input

Session 18: Writing secure Python applications

• Parsing command-line options
• Getting help with pydoc
• Safely handling untrusted data
• Managing eval() permissions
• Potential insecure packages
• Embedding code snippets in Python
• Embedding authentication data in Python
• Potentially dangerous operations:
  • File access
  • Operating system access
  • Calls to external services
  • Called to external data sources
• Static analysis tools such as Bandit

Session 19: Log File Analysis

• Raw log file manipulation
• Fail2Ban
• Customizing Fail2Ban with Python

Session 20: Security Filters

• SQL-Injection Detection
• ModSecurity CRS filtering

Session 21: Packet Analysis

• Packet Sniffing in Python

Session 22: Analytics

• Security Logging and Analytics
• Attack Detection and Defense
• Python and Spark High-Level Overview

OPTIONAL / Time Permitting

Session 23: RESTful Web Services

• What is Flask?
• Developing a Flask Web service
• Mapping resources using URLs
• Mapping resources using HTTP
• Negotiating data content

Course Materials

Student Materials: Each student will receive a Student Guide with course notes, code samples, software tutorials, diagrams and related reference materials and links (as applicable). Our courses also include step by step hands-on lab instructions and and solutions, clearly illustrated for users to complete hands-on work in class, and to revisit to review or refresh skills at any time. Students will also receive the project files (or code, if applicable) and solutions required for the hands-on work.