Extending Existing Projects
The hacker community traditionally values the free flow of information. As a result, many projects are free and open source. This means you can fork the project and extend the functionality of it. What language are many projects written in? You guessed it–Python.
If you find an existing Python tool that you like but feel is missing a feature, could be improved, or has a broken feature, you can extend it. This is one of the many advantages of knowing how to program in Python. It’s not just about using existing tools but also about contributing to the cybersecurity community by improving and expanding on what’s already available.
There are several methods for extending a project. One is to write an extension for a pluggable project. Pluggable projects are written with extensibility in mind. This means that the developers wrote the project as a framework with the ability for the community to create features asynchronously. You’re already familiar with this concept if you’ve ever modded or played a modded video game.
Sometimes, you might want to extend a project that isn’t pluggable. In Python, this can quickly be done by wrapping a project. This is done by importing the project’s functions or classes and writing code that encapsulates the project’s code. A fantastic example of code wrapping is David Kennedy’s Magic Unicorn. Note that the Magic Unicorn project uses Python to wrap non-Python code. You can do this with Python!
Finally, since Python is an interpreted language, you can modify a project’s code directly. This is generally done by forking a repository on GitHub and editing the code, but you can also clone a repository and modify the code locally. The only drawback to the latter approach is that you cannot create a Pull Request (a request to merge your code with the parent project) or persist your changes in Git.