This piece discusses the benefits of building your own penetration testing tools, particularly for cross-site scripting (XSS) reconnaissance, and explains the reasons for choosing Python as the programming language when creating these kinds of tools.
Furthermore, the article serves as a basic guide to building an XSS reconnaissance tool from scratch, despite there being several excellent tools already on the market. This is intended to be both for educational purposes and for those occasions when only a bespoke tool will do.
The author also issues a note of caution that this is for “legal penetration testing and red teaming activities, where explicit permission has been granted”, and refers the reader to a specific disclaimer at the end of the article.