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Labs

Detect System Activity Using Python

In this lab, you’ll practice and develop skills related to writing python scripts. The focus of these scripts will be to monitor different aspects of a computer system that would indicate malicious activity, allowing you as the administrator/analyst to achieve early detection of threats. When you’re finished, you’ll have the ability to detect malicious system activity, automatically run these scripts using cron jobs & have these scripts take action to resolve the issue without the need for human intervention.

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Lab platform
Lab Info
Level
Beginner
Last updated
Jul 30, 2025
Duration
3h 35m

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Table of Contents
  1. Challenge

    Get Started in the Lab Environment

    Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

  2. Challenge

    Detecting Malicious User Accounts on a System

    This challenge will teach learners how they can create a Python script that will extract a list of active users for a Linux system, compare that to all registered users, and generate an alert if there are any unauthorized user accounts on the system.

  3. Challenge

    Monitoring Storage and Memory Usage

    In this challenge, we will focus on how to monitor system resources, in particular storage and memory usage on a system. This is important from an availability point of view, for critical applications like a web server you want to ensure that these systems are not overloaded.

  4. Challenge

    Monitoring Open Ports

    In this challenge, we will look at extracting a list of all open ports and the services running on those ports for our Ubuntu system. This is important because open ports represent the attack surface of your machine to the outside world.

  5. Challenge

    Running Scripts Automatically Using Cron Jobs & Automated Detection Using auditd

    This challenge will focus on Cron Jobs and how we can use them to automatically run our scripts on a given interval. We will create a cron job that runs our scripts without the need for human intervention. You will also use the tool auditd to monitor the central log file for any changes (which would indicate potential malicious activity) and record who is doing the edits, this would ensure that no one is maliciously modifying the file in a real-world scenario.

  6. Challenge

    The Last Challenge

    Welcome to the final challenge! This is your last chance to experiment in the environment. Clicking Finish Lab will end this little world that flittered into existence just for you.

About the author

Shimon Brathwaite is a seven-year cybersecurity professional with extensive experience in Incident Response, Vulnerability Management, Identity and Access Management and Consulting.

Real skill practice before real-world application

Hands-on Labs are real environments created by industry experts to help you learn. These environments help you gain knowledge and experience, practice without compromising your system, test without risk, destroy without fear, and let you learn from your mistakes. Hands-on Labs: practice your skills before delivering in the real world.

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