Technical skills are of little value if they cannot be put to work, which is to say, put in context. While specialization, and even hyperspecialization can provide certain advantages, it comes at a cost: the inability to adjust to changes outside of one's field of expertise. It is no secret that demand for "security professionals" is high, that barriers to entry are great, and that rate of burnout is high. What starts as specialization ends with pigeonholed: trapped in a position that is unrewarding. We introduce the *Operator*: a hacker with not only depth of knowledge, but important breadth, and the ability to apply the combination of skills to problems and opportunities encountered over a lifetime.

C. Matthew Curtin is the founder of Interhack Corporation. He leads teams conducting security operations to test system security, to build security into their environments, to train client staff in security, and to acquire and assess electronic evidence. He is frequently engaged as an expert witness in legal proceedings, and has covered civil, criminal, administrative, and military matters. He was one of the leaders of Rocke Verser's 1997 DESCHALL project that broke a message encrypted the the US Government standard for data encryption, 56-bit DES for the first time in open research. His book *Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard* (Copernicus, 2005), tells the story from an insider's perspective.

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