On the other hand I feel bad for actual security employees that only probably bring in 1k a month working for them.
Is that not how it is done in general?
You want the big money you become a freelance/contractor type. You want stability/predictable income and sick pay then you become a salaried employee. Why feel bad for the second type?
As for the rewards given. Even given my dislike of steam (it is a DRM system -- why would I like it?) I would say while I have seen more generous bug bounties I have seen far far worse.
Anyone knownof there is like auniversity that hands out degrees for hackers? It seems to be a profession that pays out well...
Yes and no.
If you go looking you will find courses in "ethical hacking". When they first hit they were typically postgraduate courses but there are some undergrad offerings now.
They were generally split into two camps
1) Boring and basic security testing. Basically teaching you how to run metasploit, crack wifi passwords, run port scanners.... the usual first pass type stuff. You can also learn this on the job if you are so inclined.
2) More actual hacking. First I have long enjoyed a video called lessons of the kobayashi maru*. It highlights problems I often see with university types, not all but enough.
*video in question
Of course you also have the basically scams that will try to teach you something but are mostly there to take your money. A lot of the early ones either were that or were effectively that by the weakness of their courses. This means not all would be employers will care much for them. I mentioned undergrad earlier and many frown upon these especially as it is a hard thing to do at that level (I don't know if you have ever seen more advanced courses not care about you doing the lower level version as much as you having good maths, English or science skills). There have been some attempts to enforce standards but... yeah.
As such I still would have to look at more general computer training (the big four being straight up computing**, maths if you bias it, physics if you bias it and electrical engineering if you so much as slightly push for it) and then doing stuff on your own time.
**computing tends to be broken down into computer science aka programming and computer administration aka actually making them work/deploying them and keeping them running. You can get weak versions of both -- a computer science course that focuses mostly on Java is one thing and tends to yield a far different result to ones that require an awful lot of maths and focus on low level languages (electrical engineering will tend to default to this if you are doing the more programming side of it, but it is not the same). Administration is not without value -- I quite often bring up an example of a client I had and how it was more admin that solved their problem. They had their wordpress website twisted away from them by a web dev hired by a marketing consultant (the we'll improve your sales, adverts... type scam). I could have spent hours looking for an exploit in the php code but that would be silly when
http://wpcrux.com/blog/change-wordpress-password-phpmyadmin/ exists and that is the sort of thing administration teaches more of. Or if you prefer don't go looking for an exploit when you can instead check the default password. There is also masses of overlap but the courses will tend to focus somewhere along the line.
I don't know what sort of background the guy here had but it could have been either. I would expect a programmer to be more keenly aware of or able to explain the kind of fault covered here, however the sysadmin that has to deal with 500 different APIs in their setups and keep an eye on things from a first line security perspective (it ain't typically a programmer which installs and monitors intrusion detection systems) might be more attuned to their foibles.
A security guy however might note that traditionally developers on a service are trusted allies and with a vested interest on not having it fall over. To that end their side of things is usually given less scrutiny than the general public side of things. Such a thing might not immediately occur to either of the others.
Following from above I am probably not going to get remote access to your machine without some kind of social engineering effort. I drive a car through your front door, steal said computer and get away and then I can probably use my nice Linux livecd to read all the files on your hard drive (most people don't encrypt), and if it is actually on at the time and I keep it powered and off screensaver then so much the better.
You can also specialise
For instance I saw this video the other day
Lock me in a room with a bomb set for 48 hours with a copy of the manuals and I might get you the result there (I know enough to check outputs of functions and look for quirks that bad devs will use --
http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Signing_bug but I don't know php as well as that guy) but it is not certain I will make it out of there.
Lock me in a room with a bomb and ask me to do some of the stuff I do with game ROMs (
https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ ) and I will probably join you for lunch on the first day, others might struggle or be faced with a massive learning curve. Ask me to do crazy soldering and play with my active oscilloscope and same again. If Nintendo were to release the GBA again today (an embedded ARM device with no network abilities) then guess which skill set they would want more?
Another favourite video
I would not be very good at either (I am better at embedded OSes than web stuff but by no means great at the former) but it is a nice example of where things might meet.
I should also mention penetration testing aka pen testing, red team, and while I already mentioned metasploit I will go it again. Terms you might want to search for there. Sorry for the waffle. Only started out as a short reply but hey.
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