Whenever I watch a show like "24" or "La Femme Nikita" and see Chloe or Berkoff doing all of that stuff to infiltrate someones computer , I always wonder how do you learn to do stuff like that????? I musta slept thru that lecture in college. What languages are th most usefull for network security? I would love to learn how do "build a beter mousetrap' by doing that kinda stuff.

Any suggestions? I'm dead serious, I really would like to learn and master networking and internet security.

hey man! this is Hollywood. Reality is kept off the lot
and they're interested in telling a story for MONEY Hacking into a system is
a process of trial and error -- knowing common mistakes people make, were to
look, and how to hide the fact that you were successful. In the real world
of TOP SECRETE, the first defense is the lock on the door -- and you don't get
a fake RETNA scan or fingerprint to just walk in.

Good objective Take some classes at a local school,
read, read, read. There's always two levels to a discipline -- (a) learning out to
configure and use the tools, and then (b) actually writting the code to do the work.
(A)-->leads to -->(B) so (for the moment) don't get lost in the forrest
as you will not find the trees that way -- learn to cfg and use first.

Best wishes!

Thanks for responding. I just want to make sure that I start with a good foundation and build upwards, as opposed to running here and there and then trying to catch up or supplement (I've wasted enough of my "youth" doing that"). So where should I start? What is the first language I need to learn an master before moving on to others. Is it DOS, UNIX/LINUX, Java, C, C++, PERL, Visual Basic, Basic, FORTRAN, COBOL, JCL (just kidding with the last 2! Iused to be a mainframe COBOL programmer.)?????

COBOL,Fortran are procedural business application languages.
DOS and Unix/Linux are operating systems, not languages.
Perl, PHP, VB are interpretive languages for 'quick n easy soultions', but serious
work gets compiled, not interpreted. The big exception here is that a lot of
web cgi programs are written with this stuff.

You need to understand, no one language fits all environments, just like a
carpeter has more than one hammer -- you need to use the right tool for each job.

Before Mac OS X (which now has a FreeBSD foundation) Macs were written
in a event processing style; sort of OO but witout inheritance. Systems
are written primarily with Procedural Code using languages like C and assembler.
You gain a lot of understanding with this level of coding.

Today, APPLICATIONS are usually written using Object Oriented (OO) languages; C++, Java, and the MS exclusive C#

Systems Administration most often is not the same thing Programming.
Admins configure, tune, install, upgrade, backup n restore. If there are programs to be written, they usually are report generators
(eg: Perl== Program Extration Reporting Language)!

final thought: a study of Operating Systems and their management is NOT
an exercise in learning programming languages.