Preface

This book covers the Go programming language and explains how to apply it in the cybersecurity industry. The topics covered are useful for red and blue teams, as well as for developers who want to write secure code, and for networking and operations engineers who want to secure their networks, hosts, and intellectual property. The source code examples are all fully functional programs. The examples are intended to be practical applications that you will likely want to incorporate into your own toolkit. Moreover, this book serves as a practical cookbook for building your own custom applications. I have also shared other security best practices and tricks that I learned.

This book will walk you through examples of code that are useful in a variety of computer security situations. As you work through the book, you will build a cookbook of practical applications and building blocks to use in your own security tools for use in your organization and engagements. It will also cover some tips and trivia regarding the Go programming language and provide many useful reference programs to boost your own Go cookbook.

This book will cover several blue team and red team use cases and various other security-related topics. Blue team topics, namely steganography, forensics, packet capturing, honeypots, and cryptography, and red team topics, namely brute forcing, port scanning, bind and reverse shells, SSH clients, and web scraping, will be covered. Each chapter relates to a different security topic and walks through code examples pertaining to that topic. If you follow this book, you will have a cookbook full of useful security tools and building blocks to create your own custom tools all in Go.

This book is not an in-depth tutorial on using the Go language. One chapter is dedicated to explaining Go; however, it only scratches the surface as compared to Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan's almost 400-page The Go Programming Language. Fortunately, Go is a very easy language to pick up and has a quick learning curve. Some resources on learning Go are provided, but the reader may need to do some supplemental reading if not familiar with Go.

This book will not explore cutting-edge security techniques or vulnerabilities that are not already well documented. There are no zero-days or grand techniques unveiled. Each chapter is dedicated to a different security topic. Each one of these topics could have a book written about them. There are experts who specialize in each of these fields, so the book does not go in depth on any particular topic. The reader will have a solid foundation to explore any topic deeper when complete.