lxml VS Metasploit

lxml

Parsel is a library build to extract data from XML/HTML documents with XPath and CSS selectors support, and could be combined with regular expressions. It's usees lxml parser under the hood by default.

So, now that I no longer work in that industry, and I had some free time, I created a lazy parsing package using lxml instead of the xml parser in the standard library, which can help people who want to have a python only parsing solution.

Seriously, use LXML.

I got curious about this now so I did some tests on my own, and it appears that the XML parser implementation in Python does indeed strip all newline characters from attributes. Whether this is according to XML standard I do not know; I also briefly tried an alternative XML implementation for Python and it behaves the same, so I would assume that this is standard behavior, but I'm not knowledgable enough about XML to say for certain.

I use lxml for the XML parsing and pyodbc as the ODBC library. We have a small team so I just keep it as simple as possible: 1. A cursor yields the XML documents from a SQL query as a stream 2. A generator function parses the XML document and yields the rows (you could parallelize this step) 3. Stream each of the resulting rows to a single CSV file 4. Scoop up the resulting CSV file into the target database (usually with the DB engine's loader; bulk insert isn't so fast over ODBC) It ends up being a straight forward, low-overhead approach.

If that sounds too weird maybe take a look at pycomm3, python also has lxml as well as requests. You could write a script that retrieves the data from the clx using the appropriate pycomm3 driver for cplx and then do xml things with the data using lxml and transmit the data over http using requests.

Metasploit

Metasploit: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework

1-) Learn Hacking on a debian based distro like Kali Linux - I personally started with tools like nikto, camhacker... and then moved to more complex frameworks like metasploit.

I once had to give a presentation about Metasploit, and whether it was ethically correct for the creator to make it free and open-source, available to everyone. And in researching this I realized that there were a lot of parallels between the arguments for or against hacking tools being readily available and the arguments for or against gun control. I'll just list a few quickly:

Metasploit Framework (mentioned earlier)

This phase is where the pen testers practically prove that there exist potential vulnerabilities in the target system. The pen testers do the hacking using an array of technical approaches and social engineering methods to exploit the vulnerabilities. The ethical hackers commonly use Metasploit framework to automatically execute exploitation against the target systems. Moreover, they may install malwares such as rootkit to persistently maintain their foothold and further compromise the target system.