: Re: Character is an expert on something I'm not My OC Edward, who I thought of quite a while ago but haven't done anything with, is a professional cyber spy and hacker. He's employed by an

@Sent2472441

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Honestly, if it's far enough in the future, go nuts. Hacking--real world hacking--involves months of sitting in front of computer screens getting your soul sucked away by blinking cursors and reading dick-measuring comments on StackOverflow. It's horribly dull, and no one wants to read a thorough explanation of it unless they're at a USENIX Security conference.

One thing I will say (as a grad student in cyber security) is the vast majority of all data leaks and system compromises are not, in fact, due to technology, but due to people. Leaving passwords laying around written on paper, emailing yourself encryption keys/sensitive information, sending pictures of your credit card to your son so he can pay for that online service you forgot the password to... that sort of thing. As technology gets more advanced and more secure, more and more compromises will be due to human error and social engineering. I'd recommend making your hacker either really good at manipulating people and faking confidence (in addition to problem solving skills and writing code), or give them a colleague/partner that can exploit that human error with their own skillset. Note that you don't have to trick a high-level executive to get their information; a family member or secretary is often an easier target and any failed attempts are less likely to be noticed.

Lastly, there are tons of different coding languages, and no one will ever know all of them. However, you don't necessarily need to. Once you have a couple of languages down, you can start to figure out the rest. Hackers will know maybe 3-4 languages really well, and will be able to "hack" other languages together to do what they need. But they won't necessarily know the obscure quirks of those languages, and I wouldn't write them having to write code on the fly in a time-limited, high-pressure situation because that's just... not how it works. However, any hacker worth her salt knows how to use command line commands, and you can do a surprising amount just using basic Linux commands. Fudging a little there (for instance, your hacker has to quickly pull all data from a company computer she has physical access to for whatever reason--easy peasy).

But, here are a couple of good resources to give you an idea of what current day "hacking" is:

Computer Guys: Hacking: What you think it's like, and what it actually is.
Things About Computers & Hacking Writers Need To Know

This is an amazing article about social engineering, hacking, and how an ethical hacker did his best to compromise a company network. I highly recommend reading this, because it tells things from the hacker's perspective and gives you some insight in how your hacker would use both his tech and social engineering skills to get data he otherwise might not be able to from trying online hacks. Since most sensitive data isn't actually accessible from the Internet unless the people who own it are ignorant or poor, most data breaches happen from within an organization (e.g., Edward Snowden).

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