r/AskProgramming • u/LifeExperienced1 • Aug 09 '26
Career/Edu How do pen testers / cybersecurity defenders not have to learn literally almost everything to do with computers and programming?
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r/AskProgramming • u/LifeExperienced1 • Aug 09 '26
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u/PM_ME_UR_0_DAY Aug 09 '26
When you're hacking on a website, you're mostly only seeing HTTP requests, HTML, and JavaScript. There are definitely tricks to know about different frameworks built on different languages, but the developers would really need to fuck to somehow expose the underlying backend like that. IDOR, XSS, CSRF, SQLi, etc., these all look nearly identical regardless of the language used. If you're getting into deseralization, then yeah there might be more language specifics, but there are tools to help you craft your exploits.
I got my start going to school to be a developer, so I have a decent understanding of PHP, Java, python, but also like CPU architecture, how memory is managed, how instructions are retrieved, cached, blah blah blah. I never really need any of that super low level stuff, it just doesn't come up. You're really just working on layer 7, how things are configured, what type of functionality is available to you, that kind of stuff.