I personally doubt whether one wants to be a productive member of a society that put one into jail.
I agree with the mind of this statement. The problem is: For lots of such skills, it is hard to find jobs where these are needed (for example reverse engineering). Based on my personal observation, to stay in the example, there exist much more skilled reverse engineers than jobs where these skills are useful/needed.
I know lots of examples where this is the case (I am talking about Germany, where the situation might be a little different, but I do not believe that the difference is too large).
I know some really great reverse engineers who have difficulties to find a decent job (they get through with some badly paid jobs that are far below their skills).
I can assure that I have hardly ever seen a job ad where reverse engineering (as in software) skills are even mentioned. And I openly admit that I (who also have some knowledge in reverse engineering) would not even know where to ask/look for a job that gratifies such skills. Be assured that I would have passed on such job hints if I knew of any.
In my observation the whole "IT security" scene (I am aware this is a somewhat different area than reverse engineering) is a close-knit circle that is hard to get into. If you are able to get into, I have strong evidence that the salary is actually rather good. But I have no idea how to get into the inner circle where the job offers await.
Seriously: I have some colleagues who even asked me with my knowledge about security why I do not get into this the field of activity of IT security. I tell them to give me hints how to get into this inner circle where the interesting job offers await. None of these loudmouths could tell me. Of course...
EDIT: I could go on and on. The statements stay the mostly the same all the time: Where can such a person find job offers?
I will not disagree. But I am explicitly talking about reverse engineering as in the original article (i.e. mostly software and to a lesser (but not less important) sense electronics).
I do not know enough details about the other segments that you mention to make deep statements about them. But I am pretty confident in my opinion that the kind of skills that you require for them are really different from those that you need for software/electronics reverse engineering. What I want to say with this: The skills that you need for hacking an XBox (as in the article) do hardly ever transfer to any of your examples (bomb squad detectives, Root cause analysis experts, market/competition research, Prototyping, NTSB agent).
> Of course, they do! Reverse engineering is the skill of being able to see how things are put together without having the whole picture.
I disagree and have done quite some reverse engineering out of private interest. To me it was mostly about learning and applying an excessive amount of knowledge about obscure trivia that can hardly be applied anywhere else (except perhaps for some really rare embedded developing stuff), such as knowledge about some obscure flags in the linker format, knowledge about aracane details of the call convention and instruction encoding, arcane features of the respective CPU/chipset that probably only OS developers are even aware of, etc.
This is what > 90% of reverse engineering consist of for me: Learning/having/applying an immense knowledge of a giant amount of arcane details that are hardly useful anywhere else.
> It's having an intuition of where to find the clues to solve the bigger puzzle.
I am not aware that I have used a lot of intuition. It is rather a lot about documenting everything well, documenting how each subsystem/function relates to others, ... lots of long, monotonous (but not boring) documentation. The reasons is that if you do not document a lot, you will soon be struck by the immense amount of details. A little bit like how you would document the inner workings of a space ship that landed on earth exhaustively in terms of lots engineering diagrams.
In my opinion/experience, finding loopholes/security bugs in an existing system and designing systems that are unprone to security bugs are two very distinct skills. It is quite imaginable that many people that people who work in the branch become good at both, but being good at one of them does not make you good at the other.
EDIT: The only kind of knowledge that comes spontanously to my mind that transfers well between both areas is having an immense amount of obscure knowledge about weaknesses in lots of protocol designs.
See, its a progression not a dichotomy. A hacker possesses only a subset of a truly skilled security programmer. And the security programmer always has home field advantage. As a hacker becomes more seasoned, they learn more and more about the system until they reach the level of the security programmer or the person implementing all the locks and keys
Indeed. For this one loves to build mathematical models, formulate security properties, make proofs, think deeply about the limits of the formulated models (e.g. tempest attacks, cache timings etc. which might introduce side channels) etc.
Finding exploits is quite a different job: Here you very often have lots of legacy systems which have an architecture that is hard to make secure. To give an example: A parser for a very complicated and ill-specified file format where mistakes can easily lead to catastrophes (for example because the format allows to embed "executable scripts" that are run in a JIT-based virtual machine). So you look for loopholes in an often badly designed or at least complex and thus error-prone system and think about how you can exploit these mistakes in a clever way.
I am very sure that both can be very exciting jobs, but they are in my opinion quite different in nature.
> If I am an expert an building impenetrable servers, then I must know how to penetrate servers since I've added patches to block all known attacks. How could I do that without first being a hacker?
I think the essential difference is that if you are an expert in building impenetrable servers, you simply avoid lots of design decisions that are prone to security problems (to stay in my explanation above: these also typically have the property that they can be specified rather well formally). On the other hand, if you want to penetrate servers, you need creativity to turn "suspicious looking design decisions/oversights" into working exploits.
So being an expert in building impenetrable servers will not make you good in penetrating servers: Knowing what design decisions are hard to keep in control security-wise does not (necessarily) give you the knowledge about how to concretely exploit them. On the other hand: Having a strong creativity for how one can in practice exploit oversights does not (necessarily) make you a good engineer for systems that are hard to exploit.
The coder oversights wont be there because that seasoned expert once exploited someone else like that and knows where to defend. There is such a thing as 100% secure code. Although instances of it are very small. My point is, you get to be so good at building defenses because youve seen so many offenses and know what to expect and how to counter.
When you say "IT security" do you mean pentesting? Access management? Network security? ISO 27001 auditing? Working with any of the many security-related software suites around?
If someone were looking to join the easiest way would be find a conference near you. In the US pretty much any major city has these, but in other countries I'm sure they are just as common. Some are very professional, some are less so. If there is copious amounts of drinking you're at the right place. Generally the smaller the conference the better, so that also means less advertising and harder to find
Lots of different InfoSec groups go to meetups so at that point just talk to as many people as you can, it might seem difficult to break into a group without anyone to vouch for you but most of the time everyone is open to newcomers