> I doubt this. From what I have observed there are very skilled people in the
> underground cracking community, who have extremely good math and >programming skills.

This is completely relative.A subjects complexity is limited to
observers understanding.In order to understand the level of people on
a specified subject, we must have knowledge at least they have to see
wrongs and rights.You can't make comments on a topic which you are not
predominant unless the level of topic is higher than your knowledge.

>In many aspects I suspect that there are as many very well skilled
> people doing hacking as there are people providing security measures. I am
> not sure that those doing the latter are necessarily as good as the hackers
> though.

There are skilled people underground.Been there.But most people of
these communities are self educated which leads us to the theoretical
background deficiencies.Some cases, practically , these people can be
better and faster.But in complex problems and cases which are
requiring depth knowledge and analytical thinking, comparison is out
of question.People providing security measures is something
different.Today, most of the people who are providing penetration
testing or auditing have no knowledge in depth of what they do.They
are like users who type the relevant strings in compiled and
ready-to-go programs.Their abilities are limited to the abilities of
the softwares they use.A penetration tester who has no or superficial
knowledge at least on operating systems, protocols and commonly used
server softwares is nothing more than a fraud cheating his client.And
on the other hand, security measurement is not on the computer -
software side only.For example ; once, there was a leak in the company
and we had to examine all the employees blackberry's.Hackers are
divided into categories.If someone who can reverse an operating system
or a software and find the hole in, code the exploit for it is what I
call a hacker.Even when I was 17, I had granted access to various
systems and was some kind of a local legend.Even then, I had known
that that wasn't hacking.After I had my engineering education
everything became crystal clear.

As a result,underground people are limited because of their
theoretical deficiencies.But, it is not a personal deficiency.You can
not expect someone to slam dunk if he is 5'7" (of course there are
exceptions i.e Spud Webb)
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist