Imperva, a Cybersecurity software and services provider came to a recent conclusion that the world’s most popularly used programming language ‘Python’ is being widely used by hackers in their cyber attack tools,
The Redwood City-based company came to the above-said conclusion after finding more than 20% of GitHub Repositories filled with tools to launch cyber attacks and proof of concept exploits- all written in Python.
In virtually every security-related topic in GitHub, the majority of the repositories are being written in Python, including tools such as w3af, Sqlmap, and even in the not so famous tool of the auto split.
Imperva study fortifies the fact that out of most of the attacks which have taken place on a global note, 77 % of them were hit by some sort of Python-based tools and in at least a third of these incidents, the attack code was written in Python Language.
California based security company says that urllib and Requests are the 2 most popular Python libraries used by attackers with asyncio, being the latest.
Insights provided by Imperva doesn’t include the facts on whether defending the python based attacks is any different from dealing with other variants of exploits.
Grady Booch, working for IBM Cybersecurity says that Imperva’s perspective seems reasonable as Python requires minimal coding knowledge for writing a script and exploit vulnerabilities.
Even Thomas Reed, the Director of Mac and Mobile Security of MalwareBytes agrees to what is being said in the findings of Imperva. He adds that the said language is very popular with the white hats and so may also be a favorite of the dark world.
