Why study programming?
Ethical hackers should study programming and learn as much about the subject as possible in order to
find vulnerabilities in programs and get them fixed before unethical hackers and black hats take advantage
of them.
Many security professionals come at programming from a non-traditional perspective, often having no
programming experience prior to beginning their career.
And the bug hunting is a very much a footrace.
If a vulnerability exists, we will find it first.
The purpose of this chapter is to give you the survival skill necessary to understand upcoming sections
and then later to find the holes in software before the black hats do.
The C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie from AT&T Bell Labs.
The language was heavily used in Unix and therefore ubiquitous.
In fact, many of the stable networking programs and operating systems, as well as large applications
such as Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Reader and browsers are written in combination of C, C plus
plus Objective-C assembly and a couple of other lower level languages.