Computers & IT (Non-Engg)

Hi,
In India, companies like Wipro, Infosys and IBM are interested in employing ethical hackers. Moreover, salaries are higher than other areas of IT. According to Nasscom, India will require at least 77,000 ethical hackers compared to the present figure of 15,000. If you are well versed with the inner workings of a system and have the capabilities to discover new weaknesses in an otherwise secure system, then you will find it easy to build your career and take it to the next higher level. At the minimum you will require an undergraduate degree in computer science. Although the certifications help but they only go insofar as your skills are concerned. In many cases you have to think like a hacker, so sound grasp of system internals (including networking protocol, underlying OS, reversing skills, etc.) may be required.
You may land an average job at a startup based on the skills you have but in order to ascend to the top you will have to put some serious effort. I have seen people with average educational backgrounds making it to a position of a chief security officer from being just a security tester in a span of few years just because they had that passion of going through seemingly complicated tasks of reversing an unknown protocol to finding vulnerabilities in an otherwise secure product, just because they had the passion.
In the end it's your passion that counts.