This first chapter will discuss the challenges of security automation and take an overview of security automation tools and frameworks. The required skills, security tools, and automation frameworks will also be introduced. This will help you to gain the foundational knowledge required to build security automation measures in the coming chapters. Finally, we will also set up some sample vulnerable source code, as well as an application, for practicing security scanning in the coming chapters. This will include an illustration of dynamic security testing techniques (OWASP ZAP, NMAP, and fuzz) and static code inspection with automation frameworks (such as Selenium, Robot Framework, JMeter, and behavior-driven development (BDD)), as well as a look at mobile security testing framework integration in several hands-on case studies. In the later chapters, we will be using a project to apply all the security testing tools and automation frameworks discussed in this book.

We will explore the following topics in this chapter:

• The purposes and myths of security automation
• The required skills and suggestions for security automation
• General environment setup for coming labs