Why should we learn about hacking?

Hacking is an existing field—there are many job opportunities within it, it is happening every day, and it involves a growing demand for protection. We all heard about the Sony hack when PlayStation was down for a considerable amount of time. Companies such as Sony are actually hiring people to try to hack into them. You're going to learn how to hack into networks and systems so that you can secure them from black hat hackers.

Not so long ago, someone found a way to brute-force the restore password key for Facebook on its mobile website, because Facebook didn't check for the number of times that you entered the incorrect PIN. Once the person had done this, they told Facebook about it, and they were rewarded with $20,000, because Facebook has a bug bounty program. At the moment, many websites and companies have bug bounties – they are asking people to try to hack them, and they will pay a certain amount of money if a hack is successful, depending on how dangerous the exploit is.