I had a course on computer and network security at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. One of its prerequisites is that you need to know C. I didn't know any. I t

I had a course on computer and network security at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. One of its prerequisites is that you need to know C. I didn't know any. I told myself: I am language agnostic, I can learn a programming language on the fly. The first assignment we had to do was bruteforce passwords on a Linux machine. There was a user text file and an encrypted password textfile. This was supposed to be easy, I barely passed it. The second assignment was to simulate an attack that Kevin Mitnick did on a supercomputer. We had to spoof TCP sequence numbers from a computer that we didn't control, but back in the day TCP sequence numbers were guessable and in this assignment they made the guessability a bit easier. I think I used libraries such as libpcap and maybe anhoter one. I did a bit better than just barely passing. Assignment three was looking at binaries with source code in C and find the vulnerability and exploit it. I nailed it. That's how I 'learned' -- got some inkling of workable knowledge -- on C. I'm a bit more mild on how easy it is to be language agnostic from the get go though.