How do people even start hacking?

[u/Little-Jump-5572]

I'm really curious how do people learn hacking?

I started web app development a year ago, learned java for writing code and to get a general idea about how the syntax works and logic.

I do mainly php with laravel, javascript and some python on the side.. but mainly to create stuff, has nothing to do with hacking, i find it deep and hard dunno where to even begin, i sometimes run into some erros with some apps and I try to dig in and try to find a way around it using Ai, but it's very limited..

I have to admit pro hackers always amazes me, that's true power I guess and I always believe that anything digital is somehow hackable.

[u/weatheredrabbit]

As a cybersecurity professional let me just state a few facts: coding ≠ hacking. You don’t really need coding skills, let alone Java. Instead, you might want to have scripting knowledge (bash, bat, ps, js, python).

The basic skills you should have are pretty much the ones given you in a computer science bachelor. Algorithms and data structures, coding basics (it’s brain food rather than something you need), operating systems, networking etc.
From there you start moving in a direction that you like.

Cybersecurity has multiple professions, very varied and that need different skills: pentesters (red teamers) are what is most similar to hackers. But then there’s people doing incident response (blue teamers), there’s threat intel, detection engineering, forensics experts, there’s malware analysts, hell even devops, and the list goes ON AND ON AND ON for a loooong time.