If You Want To Be Good At Cyber Security … Go Learn Python and JavaScript

Last week, I gave a presentation on cybersecurity to college lecturers, and it was great fun. The presentation after mines was by someone from Quorum Cyber, and I enjoyed listening to it. One point that really stuck out was the advice on student education …

“If you want to do Cyber Security, be good at Python and JavaScript”

I smiled at this, because many years ago I predicted the end of JavaScript, as it just couldn’t cope with the strongly typed languages such as C#. I could only see a future of Java, C#, .NET, and so on, and where everything was run within a framework. How wrong was I?

When I first started to use Python, I disliked it. But now virtually all the code I create has Python as my back-end code.

And so it is JavaScript and Python that should be a core element in the education of our next generation of Cybersecurity professionals. You will find JavaScript is involved in creating a modern user interface, and now, with node.js, we see JavaScript at the back-end. The days of technical people avoiding scripting are thus past, and now it has become a standard tool in data analytics, cloud infrastructures, pen testing, crypyoanalysis, and in so many areas.