Coding is an essential skill across almost every technological discipline today, and cybersecurity is no exception.
Cybersecurity professionals must understand coding concepts in order to correctly interpret the activity of malicious actors on their networks, and they must be able to write code to perform their own work more efficiently and effectively.
While not every cybersecurity job explicitly includes coding skills as a job requirement, it's hard to imagine any cybersecurity career that wouldn't benefit from the ability to knock out at least a few lines of code every once in a while.
Let's take a look at each of these important programming languages, examining why you need them and how to learn them.
Python is the modern workhorse of programming languages.
As a member of the group of languages known as general-purpose languages, you'll find that you can accomplish almost any software development task in Python, and for this reason, it's incredibly popular.
If you're only going to learn one language, this is definitely the place to start.
Python code lays beneath the surface of many popular cybersecurity tools, and it's easy to use Python to automate much of your work.
If you're using a Linux or Mac OS, you'll want to learn one of the Linux shell scripting languages, such as Bash.
HyperText Markup Language isn't strictly a programming language.
It's the language used to create webpages across the internet.
HTML is an essential skill for cybersecurity professionals because so many attack types revolve around HTML code.
HTML is a pretty simple language to learn, and you can pick up the basics in a few hours.
The reason for this is that, as a markup language, HTML starts with plain text and then uses a series of code elements known as tags to format that text and include other webpage elements, such as images and embedded video.
It's also the language used in many web-based application attacks, such as cross-site scripting.
As with other coding languages, you can pick up some basic JavaScript in the tutorials available from any site, such as those at W3Schools.
View the source of a webpage, and look for JavaScript code, trying to figure out the purpose and intent of the code.
SQL, or Structured Query Language, is the language of relational databases.
Attackers also use this language to steal sensitive information, disrupt data stores and wage a series of web-based attacks.
If you're still feeling overwhelmed, just pick any one of the five languages above, and get started.
This Cyber News was published on www.techtarget.com. Publication date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 19:13:05 +0000