no one mentioned it but the secret sauce is to have a "thing" for breaking and exploiting things. whether it's good or not is yours to decide. but here's my exp

no one mentioned it but the secret sauce is to have a "thing" for breaking and exploiting things. whether it's good or not is yours to decide. but here's my experience... talented hackers, white, gray, black, whatever, excel at breaking and exploiting things. and people. and i have always struggled with that... in college i took a computer security class. my class had the team ranked #1 in Maryland (US) among young coming up group of hackers. what i saw them do is always, and i mean always, thinking of ways to break things. i mean, well, it's broken a tad bit, adding this or that will fix it. no! i saw them exploit every little tiny thing! i wanted to "fix" things. i wanted to be a "good" programmer. i was like: "oh they didn't do this, what should they have done to make more secure?". a good hacker was like "oh they didn't do this, what can i do to exploit it?" i hope my little experience convey to you how they think. or at least what i saw first hand while taking that class. for me it's hard, i wanted to fix things. they wanted to break things. i didn't fail my class. i wasn't good at it either... but i admire them and i am still amazed by what these people can pull off.