A regular expression (regex) is a sequence of characters that defines a search expression. A regex enables security professionals to quickly sift through large datasets, grouping data entries, highlighting signs of rogue data, and identifying patterns within it.
This short chapter teaches you about regexes, which are specifically referenced in section 2.1 in the 210-255 specification, and always makes an appearance as one of the questions in the exam.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Using regexes to find normal characters
- Using regexes to find characters in a set
- Using regexes to extract groups of characters
- Using regex logical operators
The techniques shown (specifically the regex strings used) have been created for demonstrating the concepts. They are not the most efficient way of performing some of these searches, although they will work.