How similar is hacking to 21st Century pharma discovery?

Reading this thread on the latest advancement in antibiotics, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852487) I noticed several commenters touching on various strategies that seemed eerily similar to hacking...penetration testing, brute force fuzz testing, vulnerability analysis. The language and the medium is different, but at an abstract level, the strategies appear to be similar.

For someone versed in both worlds, how similar is it in reality, and are there advancements in say, white hat hacking that have counterparts in medicine/biology/genomics?