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The InfoSec World Has a Python 2.7 Problem

Welcome to 2019, everyone! The future is bright, and I am sure we will all experience a lot of fun and unexpected things in the world of security. So far this year, we haven’t see anything along the lines of Specre/Meltdown, which helped usher in 2018.

One thing I did realize is that the turning of the calendar to this new year, remarkably, means that there is less than one year until Python 2.7 is officially “unsupported.”

Just check the Python 2.7 Countdown clock if you don’t believe me. Everything should be well on the way to Python 3 by now. Or so you would hope.

I find it somewhat humorous (mildly) that the infosec community still relies so heavily on Python 2.7, given its impending doom. I still see new tools being actively developed in this version of Python crossing my news feed almost daily. So many things on Kali Linux rely on Python 2.7.

I have oberved that longstanding, popular open source stalwarts of the trade have shown little interest in moving to 3.x.

I really have no idea what to do about this, other than encourage contributors to migrate, and to lend a hand if and where possible. But it’s getting really late, and I still have to use python2.7 far too much in my day-to-day pentesting and security research life.

How about a New Year Resolution?

Published inSecuritySoftware

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