PyCon 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio

Friday 11:30 a.m.–noon in Atrium Ballroom AB

A Snake in the Bits: Security Automation with Python

Moses Schwartz, Andy Culler

Description

Security incident response is an intense, high stress, high skill job that relies heavily on human judgement. Despite that, for reasons that we can't begin to understand, a big part of an incident responder's job seems to be opening numerous browser tabs and copy-pasting bits of text from one system to another. The hard parts of incident response can't be automated, but there are entire classes of busy-work that we can eliminate with a few web hooks and some artisanal Python. In this talk we're going to discuss how to use Python to automate security incident response team (SIRT) operations. We'll give an overview of what a typical SecOps/SIRT infrastructure looks like, how and where automation fits in, and dive into some code. We'll walk through a simple example, with screenshots and code, of automating a SecOps process. We want to show that  getting started with security automation doesn't have to be difficult or expensive (though vendors will happily take your money). Just a little bit of Python can make some great quality of life improvements for incident responders.