Too few people in the world understand technology. Of those, the vast majority don't do anything creative with it. I would put myself in this category. A few people are extraordinarily creative and come up with the exploits we read about in the news.
Let's say you're a competent programmer with minimal prior exposure to security. I don't want to be Picasso, I just want to learn how to paint so I understand how he does it. For the record, I'd say a working hands-on knowledge of this should inform the design of any system. Is it a person-to-person oral tradition? Is it on some private message boards somewhere?
Text files? There used to be Magazine, does anyone still read that? Maybe it's all of the above. I would argue the magazines such as , which I absolutely loved when I was young and books and oral tradition are all just ways of passing around specific and awesome anecdotes: it doesn't teach you how to do that, it is just interesting facts or entertainment for people who know. What you need, instead, is a mindset: when you are at the supermarket checking out with one of those self-checkout machines, does some part of your brain start figuring out mistakes made in the mechanism that might allow someone to steal items?
If not, that is the kind of thought process that you need to get yourself to start doing: you need to keep asking yourself "if I were evil, could I do something evil here?
With this mindset, finding exploits in software just becomes "teach me to program", as the kind of devious backchatter in your brain will just see things popping out "wait, what's to keep someone from cheating here and doing the opposite of what you say? The really epic hacks then just come from many years the stereotypical 10, hours of experience programming and trying things: it isn't because they read some magazine or learned from someone else.
