How Programming helps hackers?
From web application security to network application security, anything and everything is about coding. In addition, having an expert programming hand gives you an advantage and makes you independent to design your attack accordingly. Hackers work anonymously and this is their greatest strength.
Having a good knowledge of creating malicious applications can help you destabilize entire platforms with a little help from hacking tools. Many hacking tools available for free on the Internet to help you a little on your adventures, but you can also buy hacking tools for specific target operations.
Why programming is the most important skill for hackers?
Mastering a programming language allows you to be self-dependent and gives you the knowledge of working of programs to exploit them easily. Even though exploit development is mainly done in the assembly language in debuggers, learning the functioning of a program could be very useful.
It’ll help you to write your own exploits in C/C++ and ditch the frameworks like Metasploit. Learning programming also gives you the power to create your own custom malware, making it difficult for an antivirus software to detect.
Most of the hacking tools are freely available and open source. So, if you’ve mastered the art of programming, using hacking tools and making them better is an easy task.
So, before you start with the basics of hacking, learn to code and create a solid foundation.
What programming languages are typically used by hackers?
There are no set programming languages that can be used when hacking computers, but there are some ones that are more common than others:
- Python: This is the most popular all around language for anything related to cybersecurity. It’s a security professionals programming language of choice and a good one to start with.
- PHP: This language isn’t as popular as it once was but there are still many applications and scripts that are written in PHP. Therefore, it’s still very useful to be familiar with it. One big example of this wordpress, wordpress is written in PHP and supports millions of websites on the internet. Approximately 40% of all websites run on wordpress, which means they run on a PHP application.
- Javascript: This language has become extremely popular for anything to do with web design and animations. Therefore, for anything to do with web application or website hacking it’s useful to know javascript. Also, it’s the language primarily used in cross site scripting attacks (XSS).
- C/C++: This language is very popular for memory based attacks such as a buffer overflow attack. C doesn’t have the same built in controls that other languages have, which means you can use it to perform some unique attacks. A buffer overflow takes advantage of the fact that the language doesn’t have built in memory control and purposely overwrites certain parts of memory in order to perform an attack.