Depending on your auto-didact capabilities, you can start this process by studying with the various on-line paid courses, there may be some free ones as well. S

Depending on your auto-didact capabilities, you can start this process by studying with the various on-line paid courses, there may be some free ones as well. Someone already in security can further advise you the degree of specialisation or granularity for you to pursue. The field is both wide and deep. You can sub-study in Windows, Linux, Unix,IOS - in addition there are sub areas, like data base makers, like Oracle and others. Once you have selected the area you want to specialize in you need to study in depth, following reference trees etc. The paid courses offer certification via tests with their fees. Deciding the particular special area, the next stage is to seek employment at your certificate level(you may have a number of certs). Companies also specialise in areas, so inspect the field. Bear in mind, you will need to acquire system expertise on the system you specialise on = buy a typical system as a practice field, you may have several systems. There are many openings, so recruiters will present you with choices = you apply. If your self study is well done, you will get interviewed to plumb your abilities, and you may get offers. Do not neglect the government, NSA and military, there are many valuable roles you can fill. The famed hackers you have read about are often self taught trial-and-error people, who by perseverance and intelligence have become narrowly specialised at hacking. In many respects a lot of the low hanging fruit has been gathered - that said modern systems are bewilderingly complex and there seem to be a huge number of hidden bugs being found daily. Some are sold to companies by their bug bounty programs, which you may have read about. Some are sold to bad actors who keep them quiet and selectively employ them by national actors. Their value goes down once they are exposed and get exploited for gain - the so called 'zero-day' - when it suddenly gets used for mal use widely and the OS makers try to examine the bug and deploy a patch to kill the exploit as fast as they can. Patch negligence extends the life of an exploit - obviously patched systems are immune. Sorry, to repeat what many may already know. Good luck,