What coding languages should I learn if I want to work in cybersecurity?

Hi Michelle,

Cybersecurity is a big topic and basically every area of coding profits from it and depends on it. Whenever you write a piece of code, you want to make sure, that it doesn't gets exploited in an not intended way. E.g. you have:

• Cross side scripting on websites (Javascript based)
• DDOS attacks (aim on a webserver, that can be written in Javascript (like Node.js), or Java (Apache Tomcat), etc)
• Scripted DDOS attacks like Slow Loris (can be written in any language)
• SQL Injection (focus on Database using SQL)
• Cookie Cracking (not focused on a language, but more on encryption and hashing)
• OS-Exploids (This requires knowledge on basic languages like C and Assemble)
• Attack on open ports using SSH, TCP, HTTP (a good understanding of UNIX systems is required here)
• Cross-Site-Request-Forgery (understand of how HTTP-Request to servers work)
• Local and remote file inclusion (good understanding of the webserver and framework you work with (like PHP))

What I wanted to point out here: Every language and framework that you learn, will help you with cybersecurity. Most companies search for people that are good in one specific area. E.g. you could only focus on securing the frontend of a webpage using technologies like Javascript, without the need to have any knowledge in basic languages like C. Or you focus on the correct setup of a webserver and you don't need to write a single line of JS code.

My tip is: Learn and train what you enjoy most, because somebody will search for an (security-)expert in this topic for sure.

(In case this you really want to have a guide what to learn next, I suggest to start learning a Web-Framework like Ruby on Rails, or PHP, to get the basic knowledge about backend architectures, because you will also need this, if you want to know, how to make your frontend more secure)