http://www.usatoday.com/careers/dream/dream.htm

Each week, the USA TODAY Online Career Center asks celebrities,
businesspeople and folks who are just plain happy in their work exactly what
makes their jobs great.

This week: How would you like to be paid to access private information and
steal billions of dollars from companies - legally? Meet corporate espionage
expert, cybersleuth and ZDTV's Spy Files columnist Ira Winkler.

Q: How did you obtain this job?

A: I guess I would call what I have more of a career or identity than a job.
I got the reputation of being a "Modern Day James Bond" because of my
success in performing penetration tests. I lucked into my first penetration
test and was able to take over a very large bank by just calling them up and
asking questions. I wrote a paper about how I accomplished it, and people
started calling it the seminal work on social engineering. From that paper,
people started to call me to perform other assignments.

After I achieved some notoriety, many people started claiming that they do
the same types of penetration tests that I do. The reality of the situation
was that they just break into computers, which is actually very easy. Then
they might look in people's offices and steal passwords. I am the only
person who has consistently demonstrated the ability to steal billions of
dollars within several hours, using advanced human and technical espionage
techniques.

[..]


(This type of characterization of pen testing, under any label, is the same
crap that movies peddle to us. Ira Winkler's own words make him seem more
fit for Hackers than the
security field. The repeated claims of "stealing billions" from any business
are absurd, just as his claims of using "advanced human" techniques are
anything other than social engineering that many companies routinely perform
on engagements.)