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Which are the programming languages for security admins?
Cybersecurity is growing fast, along with advances in information technology (IT) today. The dire need to protect infrastructures worldwide requires ensuring that communications are secured to maintain data integrity and confidentiality. However, ensuring its availability is required. Each facet of every system depends on the utmost security protections to keep threats away.
One quote from the Computer security world says, "Hackers only need to get it right once. We have to get it right every time." Although it's discouraging to think of the never-ending, uphill battle cybersecurity professionals, have before them. The saying is 100% accurate, and security admins must be aware and understand this as an integral part of their job function.
As your career in cybersecurity grows, the requirement to prevent critical infrastructure, applications, and the software will only expand exponentially. The below programming languages will help professionals work smarter, not harder, by automating defensive tasks, performing penetration tests to help recognize bugs and malicious code, and writing code that patches security holes.
C
'C' is a low-level programming language that has been in use for around five decades and was designed with cross-platform support in mind. If appropriately structured, programs can be collated with minimal changes to the source code across multiple OSes. Due to its deep level of integration with system hardware, applications are compromised a broader security threat because of the capacity to manipulate hardware resources.
Being capable of reading source code generated from C-based languages will provide in-depth insight into recognizing malicious code and correcting the code's vulnerabilities. It provides secAdmins an unparalleled advantage to thwart attacks before occurring.
The best-suited roles for C programmers are software developers, penetration testers, and application testers.
Python
Python, the most popular modern programming language, has a cross-platform capacity, extensive community support, and ubiquitous nature. These features allow it to be flexibly incorporated into any system, and it lends itself to perform any task.
Python can run on multiple systems. Therefore, security admins prefer to leverage their testing scripts, including those used by red teams when initiating attacks or during penetration testing campaigns, as the tasks perform regardless of the host's OS.
The best-suited job roles for Python programmers are penetration testers, systems administrators, and SecOps.
JavaScript
Although JavaScript may not be so popular, it is a widely used language in the modern world. Averaging over 97% in market share trends and used in just about every website, JavaScript is in massive demand nowadays.
Security professionals get benefitted from being able to interpret, write, and correct errors in JS to secure code from prevalent attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting, Cross-Site Forgery Request, and SQL Injection.
Penetration testers, web developers, and DevOps are the best-suited jobs for security professionals.
PHP
As PHP serves as a web-based language, it is estimated that nearly 80% of all websites use it in some way. Its growth in market share is the shift to the web or cloud over traditional apps. Fuelling growth is the adoption of popular CMS platforms like WordPress, which are written entirely in PHP.
It might shock you that if market share increases, threats against those platforms enlarge substantially, and these threats could cause serious harm if they reveal information stored in a database, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). They could even help session hijacking. If you know this language, it could prevent some of these demonic attacks.
PHP programmers can pursue careers as penetration testers, web developers, and DevOps.
SQL
Structured Query Language (SQL) is the process by which data is managed as it gets stored in a relational database. The benefits of using databases to store data over substitute read-write methods like APIs typically focus on the ability to access multiple records at once and without specifying how records are accessed. Databases can scale accordingly, delivering a method for storing as much data as the hardware will support.
SQL programmers can opt for career opportunities as database administrators, penetration testers, and web developers.