Why is C so popular in cybersecurity?

Some fields of cyber security it is certainly popular. When it comes to finding exploits and bugs, it makes sense to use the language that dominates the field of creating low-level programs. For decades now microchips have been optimized towards C compatibility and C compilers towards microchip compatibility. It makes sense to use the language the program was written in to find weaknesses. Furthermore, most exploits rely on fairly low-level stuff like memory addresses, use-after-free, buffer overflows etc. Many other languages simply do not offer the capacity to talk this close to the hardware. However finding and plugging exploits is Χ only a small part of cybersecurity. Other fields will have other languages that are popular, or they might not even have one. Social engineering, technically also part of cybersecurity, uses the human language to gain access to systems. Some firewalls use plain text files or whatever niche language their manufacturers created. read less