You start here: http://thelegendofrandom.com/blog/archives/223 or here http://www.reteam.org/ID-RIP/database/essays/es29.htm and spend hundreds of hours on reading and using debuggers.

omg that is so cool!!! so this is how 'serial crackers' work.

Same here. It always eluded me. Security seems like a field where there is still no definite way to get good at.

Being a good security researched requires (among many other things) ability to understand how things work. How ANY things work down to the LOWEST level. Idk about others but I always considered 'security guys' to be the elite of elites in IT world.

yeah i knew it boils down to some really low level knowledge but seems like a lot of black magic to me regardless on how people end up being able to publish papers or discover vulnerabilities...is it just educated trial and error ? poking at things that you think, hmmm maybe there's a hole here somewhere and then viola, you come across a CVE?

Creating malware is simple, creating good malware that stays undetected is hard, very hard.