Learning Penetration Testing with Python

Understanding protection mechanisms

There are entire books dedicated to some of the tools out there for administrators and developers, which will prevent many exploits. They include items such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), which would stop code like ours from working if the code and OS were configured to take advantage of it. This is done by preventing execution of data on the stack. We can bypass DEP by simply overwriting the Structured Exception Handling (SEH) to run our own code instead.

Stack Canaries, which are basically mathematical constructs in the stack, check when the return pointer is called. If the value has changed then something has gone wrong and an exception is raised. If an attacker determines the value the guard is checking ...