Eli5: How does hacking work? What languages do you need and how do you link them? How people make a living with it?

Question

Eli5: How does hacking work? What languages do you need and how do you link them? How people make a living with it?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Hacking is more than just writing code, and there are many forms of hacking. The way you’d get a company’s secure server to send you it’s entire contents is way different than guessing someone’s password for a social media account, for example.

There isn’t any one language for hacking, different hackers have their preferred languages and some hacks require a specific programming language depending on loads of variables.

People make a living from hacking by either being paid by the companies they hack so they can improve security (which is known as White Hat Hacking), hacking the company then telling them about a security bug later (some companies pay for this, others don’t, in any case that’s Gray Hat Hacking), or by hacking a company and selling the data off to someone else without ever informing the company they were hacked (Black Hat Hacking).