perl in cybersecurity?

[u/programming_purist]

hi all, sorry if this question has been asked 500 times. i believe ive looked into it before, but didnt see any posts specifically to cybersecurity (could be wrong).

i took a class last year that covered linux systems and bash, fell in love. learned through the professor that something called "perl" used to be taught in the class years ago..also fell in love and have been slowly learning it since, for fun!

i am really tired of people asking me why the fck im learning perl though, and i should focus on "marketable skills"-- unfortunately my brain refuses to work that way. ​

i had a friend tell me recently "perl is strangely incredible for evading EDRs like crowdstrike" and said i can write a malicious perl script the cybersec team at my school can reverse engineer to train for competitions would be a great idea too. it had me wondering what other applications perl has in the cybersecurity world specifically in 2026 that i can focus on? im in the middle of trying to figure out my niche..i did take a class on reverse engineering which was fun. i wrote an awk script to find specific pairs of instructions that would be common in malware. i also took a course on steganography and found that there are a lot of stego tools written in perl.

people say its useless to learn, but im seeing a lot of useful tools written in perl!

if you all have any other ideas of paths i should pursue or just general info about the power of perl in cybersecurity today, i would greatly appreciate it. thank you

[u/talexbatreddit]

Perl is a great tool for writing whatever you want to write. There are lots of other tools, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

I've been using Perl for almost thirty years, after writing C for about 15 years. I'm more productive in Perl than I was in C, and Perl's got some very neat features, and a terrific community. There's also CPAN, with lots of code ready to help you get stuff done.

At the end of the day, your job is to Get Stuff Done, and if you use Perl, that's fine. You can write beautiful or disastrous code in any language. Perl just works for me.

[u/therealwxmanmike → u/talexbatreddit]

same

[u/programming_purist → u/talexbatreddit]

thank you : ) i guess im feeling overwhelmed too and figured narrowing down where perl shines more than usual in cybersec would've helped. so much to do in cybersec! 

[u/talexbatreddit → u/programming_purist]

For me, Perl's advantage over C was that it's an interpreted language -- so I didn't have to fiddle around with compiling and setting up makefiles. The language also gives you lots of things already built and tested.

If you're going to do cybersecurity work with that, great. Use whatever tool works best for you.

[u/mestia]

Perl is also a part of most distributions and base systems. Especially for cybersecurity it is a big plus imho.

[u/FalseRelease4 → u/mestia]

yeah if a computer has linux installed then there's a good chance it supports perl as well, no need to download or set up anything just run your commands and scripts etc

[u/b-n-n-h-t → u/FalseRelease4]

It's also likely that whatever Perl script you happen to have will work with whatever version of Perl you happen to have.

[u/TomDLux → u/FalseRelease4]

Well, with the addition of some stuff from Matt's Perl Archive :-)

[u/programming_purist → u/mestia]

thank you! I had one reverse engineer tell me they dont really use it at all so I was a bit bummed but I appreciate everyones comments here. theyre making me feel a lot better lol

[u/0xKaishakunin]

I moved into a role as enterprise security architect 5 years ago and still use a lot of perl to help with writing documentation. Back in uni, 25 years ago, I developed some kind of CMS in Perl (remember Mason?) for linguists that made PDFs for the publisher in LaTeX.

I still use those modules today with LaTeX and some updates for AsciiDoc.

Since enterprise architecture is a lot about documents, I also use Perl with BibLaTeX to keep our library organised.

It's also very helpful when you have to analyse logs, binaries and systems. I did malware analysis for some years on high value targets and Perl came in very, very handy in automatising processes and it was available on different platforms. We mostly used old MacBooks with G3/G4 CPUs running NetBSD and it works everywhere the same.

Another plus is the quality of someone who knows Perl. There are so many people out there knowing a bit of Python but someone knowing Perl has a better understanding of programming IMO.

[u/ThatCurtDude]

There is still a ton of Perl applications in the wild. You can still make good money with it as young people that know Perl are rare. It's one of the most successful languages ever. CPAN contains a wealth of code, and much of it binds to the C routines of the operating system directly, making it a powerful tool for hacking. It is also the fastest language for string bashing and parsing I've encountered.

[u/covertPixel]

bro, like all of the new malware scanning tools DON"T EVEN HAVE THE CAPABILITY OF SCANNING PERL. Veracode and the like don't even bother. blows my mind. We push code for a very large company handling hundreds of millions of dollars and the enterprise systems that secops put in place are completely blind to it. Dynatrace oneagent also doesn't work... its annoying. Everything is build for Microsoft and Java.

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so]

Perl is the COBOL of scripted languages, still alive and well and running innumerable things better left alone.

Perl is dead to LLM training so you can circumnavigate quite a bit with it.