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Alarm Raised On Teenage Hackers
Arno Igne writes to tell us that the number of underage participants in "high-tech" crimes has risen steeply in recent history. Reporting children as young as 11 swapping credit card details and asking for hacks, many are largely unskilled and thus more likely to get caught and arrested. "Communities and forums spring up where people start to swap malicious programs, knowledge and sometimes stolen data. Some also look for exploits and virus code that can be run against the social networking sites popular with many young people. Some then try to peddle or use the details or accounts they net in this way. Mr Boyd said he spent a lot of time tracking down the creators of many of the nuisance programs written to exploit users of social networking sites and the culprit was often a teenager."
I wish we had a term to describe that... something that notes the fact they are younger, and simple in their skills... Maybe "script kiddies?"
Script kiddies have been around since the AOL days. Hell, I myself got a juvenile laugh out of punters (remember those? God, the AIM clients were so terrible back then) and other "progs".
Mostly I imagine the vast majority of this stuff nowadays is myspace-related. Probably kids trying to break into someone else's myspace page because they're little drama whores like that.
Problem solved?
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Ha! good point.
I guess once you are 18 you are no longer too young to go to a federal prison.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Apply to ISPs also. Problem is today that most ISPs actively shield users on their system which engage in malicious activity.
The answer is always they will not cooperate without a court order. Of course, if the police ask nicely they cooperate without a court order. But after a system is broken into unless there is at least $25,000 in provable damages you aren't going to get anyone in law enforcement interested. And that is just the beginning.
So if someone is downloading child porn, the police are right there on that. If they break into your system and cause hours of downtime nothing happens. This can be considered to be tacit encouragement. Helping the folks learn about computers. Roughly the same way that gangbangers learn about automatic weapons.
find a flaw in the system, the flaw will be found by someone else
the nice thing about kids being the perps is that there is no more nefarious purpose than "i did for the lulz". do you really think if these teenagers weren't loudly and clumsily exploiting security holes that someone else with much more nefarious purposes is not expoliting the same security holes quietly and discreetly?
consider kids hacking websites to be that website's security research division. the flaws are found, the flaws are fixed, everyone makes out better. thank god for loud dumb scrit kiddies
seriously, script kiddies are a blessing. they provide incentive to harden your website, incentive that some websites don't have and apparently need
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I got my first computer when I was 10 around 95-96, within a year I discovered that I could pretend to be someone else by setting up a somewhat legitimate email account and sounding official. My friend and I would email tripod users, geocities users etc... posing as someone who offered free web services. Eventually we would get passwords to their accounts, change the password, and vandalize the web page (eventually we got tired of doing of this, i think we discovered girls around age 12). I didn't learn that this was called phishing until I was in high school. On the plus side it forced me to learn HTML (I wanted my vandalizing to look good), which eventually lead to a career in web development. Hopefully these delinquents can be saved too.
Apply that to the internet and... We get exactly what we need right? You may not enjoy social networking sites but what if someone used slashdot in a crime? Or wikileaks? Seriously is that the presendent you want set?
I highly doubt that. I used to be a landlord in a rough area of town. We'd see cops there at least once a day. There's no way in hell they can expect a landlord to police. A landlord collects money (only sometimes) and maintains the ground and is in charge of repairs, not law enforcement.
This probably boils down to parents that are clueless. "But he was only playing on his computer!"
So parents need to be educated that there's more you can do with a PC and an Internet connection than browse and play WoW.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Back when I was a kid, it was those skills that we had to develop to GET the pr0n! When the biggest source was a local BBS with a reasonably vigilant sysop, we had to get creative. It taught me a little about social engineering... like if you registered with a totally unpronounceable foreign name, the sysop would just validate you without a phone call because he didn't want to mispronounce it.
Seriously, this has been how it is since the early 80s. 25 years ago it was the teenagers who were war-dialing and breaking into time-sharing systems. They're the ones who've got free time for it. As you get older you get into college or into a job and you've got a lot less free time for messing around like that. It only makes sense, then, that school kids would be one of the two major groups doing this (the other being those adults for whom this kind of crime is their job).
The education system is waaaaay ahead of you, buddy.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
If you don't talk to your children about KNOWLEDGE, who will?
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...and, suddenly, that Offspring track makes complete sense. I must have been too young at the time.
"Don't hate the media, become the media." -Jello Biafra