It is a "real thing", but it is also illegal. Movies etc have glorified hacking but in reality it is pretty crazy boring from my perspective. Imagine doing reverse engineered code reviews for endless hours or pouring over stack traces to find a poorly written, and exploitable, sequence of instructions.
Then you build and test the exploit, and make it into a tool for easy use and distribute it to the other 99% of the 'hacking community' who are really just script kiddies doing your dirty work.
That doesn't sound nearly so interesting.
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