> If you're a security practitioner, teaching yourself how to hack is also part of the "Hacking is Cool" dumb idea. Think about it for a couple of minutes: tea

> If you're a security practitioner, teaching yourself how to hack is also part of the "Hacking is Cool" dumb idea. Think about it for a couple of minutes: teaching yourself a bunch of exploits and how to use them means you're investing your time in learning a bunch of tools and techniques that are going to go stale as soon as everyone has patched that particular hole. I would strongly disagree with that. You can't defend against something you don't understand. You definitely shouldn't spend time learning some script-kiddie tool, that is pointless. You should understand how exploits work from first principles. The principles mostly won't change or at least not very fast, and you need to understand how they work to make systems resistant to them. One of the worst ideas in computer security in my mind is cargo culting - where people just mindlessly repeat practises thinking it will improve security. Sometimes they don't work because they have been taken out of their original context. Other times they never made sense in the first place. Understanding how exploits work stops this.