CHAPTER 2

Programming Survival Skills

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 take advantage of them. Many security professionals come at programming from a nontraditional perspective, often having no programming experience prior to beginning their career. Bug hunting is very much a foot race: if a vulnerability exists, who will find it first? The purpose of this chapter is to give you the survival skills necessary to understand upcoming chapters and then later to find the holes in software before the black hats do.

In this chapter, we cover the following topics:

•   C programming language ...

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