Danny's newsletter - Issue #30

Regex

There are many tools used in the field of Cybersecurity. One of them that is extremely useful to learn is Regular expressions. 

Regular expressions, or regex for short, are a powerful tool used to match patterns in text. In the field of cybersecurity, regex can be used for a variety of tasks such as searching log files for suspicious activity, to detect malicious activity, and to implement filters to block undesirable traffic.

Overview

A few use cases for regex: validating input in web forms to prevent injection attacks, blocking malicious traffic with a web application firewall, searching for all IP addresses or Email addresses within a log file. The syntax is a bit terse, but we will discuss more of this later.

Sometimes called a "write-only" language

These are just some of the use cases you can leverage regex in.

Despite the many benefits of using regex in cybersecurity, it is important to keep in mind that regex can be complex and difficult to understand, especially at first (or after coming back to it after some time 😆).  It is always a good idea to thoroughly test and validate any regex patterns before using them in production environments.

In conclusion, regex is a powerful tool that can be used in various aspects of cybersecurity, such as searching for patterns in log files, validating input in web forms, and blocking malicious traffic.  In the next issue, we will discuss specific use cases for regex with examples.