Do you need programming for hacking?

This is a very common question in the ethical hacking community. “Is programming required for hacking?”. The answer you might’ve found when you looked this up , is “It depends.”

I would like to give my personal opinion on this and say that, yes you do need some programming skills to be a good ethical hacker. I believe that if you know some programming, not necessarily at a high-level, but at least at an intermediate level, you will understand better how programs and systems work. This understanding of software will help you be more proficient in hacking.

# What is essential to have as an ethical hacker?

• Basic scripting & automation

You don’t really necessarily need to have programming skills, but you do need scripting and automation skills. The reason is very simple. On your journey as a hacker, you will come to realize that most of the things you are doing is a repeating process. Why not learn scripting and code a bash script to automate some of your tasks? You can already see how these type of skills are useful for hacking. And this does not just apply to hacking, but really to any IT position. Your work will be much faster if you have scripting & automation skills .

Some project recommendations:

-> Port scanning automation

-> Information gathering and recon automation

-> OSiNT automation ; shameless plug : https://github.com/falkensmz/tw1tter0s1nt

-> Python automation

# What skills are really good to have as an ethical hacker?

A really good add-on for hacking, is programming. Apart from the fact that you’ll understand software better, another really important factor is that you’ll be able to program your own hacking tools and that includes : custom port scanners, custom enumeration programs, custom backdoors (designed by you to carry out specific tasks), network sniffers, man-in-the-middle programs (arp-spoofers, dns-spoofers), wi-fi bruteforcing programs and many more.

# In conclusion

• My personal opinion is that you need to have basic-programing skills to be a good ethical hacker, however, having a deep-understanding in programming will make your life much easier and much more flexible in terms of tools and programs.