Scripting & Automation

jq / yq

JSON/YAML processors for parsing tool output at scale.

beginner

Linux

macOS

Reconnaissance

Reporting

Authorized testing only. Practice on systems you own, isolated labs, or targets with written permission. Unauthorized access is illegal.

Modern tools output JSON — you need to filter and join data.

Pipe nuclei/httpx/awscli JSON through jq filters.

Data wrangling is half of real recon work.

Commands & usage

cat nuclei.json | jq -r '.info.name'

jq -s 'add' *.json

yq '.spec.containers[].image' deployment.yaml

Commands are educational examples. Adapt hosts, paths, and rates to your authorized scope.

Python 3

Primary scripting language for security automation and exploit tooling.

Bash / POSIX Shell

Shell scripting for glue logic, loops over targets, and quick ops.

PowerShell

Windows automation and offensive/defensive scripting environment.

Scapy

Python packet manipulation library for custom protocol work.

Ansible

Automation engine useful for lab provisioning and hardening baselines.

CyberChef

The Cyber Swiss Army Knife — encode/decode/compress/parse in-browser.