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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?"
At what age does high-tech crime become legal then?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
There are cases of Immigrant smuggling where the drivers were juveniles because juveniles are much more difficult to prosecute.
That's how I'd operate if I were a fraudster - have the kids to the dirty work and give them a cut. There are hordes of bored shithead suburban kids who would love to be "elite haxxors" and they would most likely avoid prosecution the first time.
I forget the term, but there are laws on the books that state that if you are a landlord, and you continually have tenants who engage in criminal activity that the authorities can confiscate the house. It is a slow process, but the point is that if you own the property that you have some responsibility in insuring that it isn't being used for purposes that are harmful to society.
Apply that to social networking sites and...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Problem solved?
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
I wonder if kids had some kind of job if they would be less likely to steal or break the law.
The whole of western civilisation is DOOMED!!
Or at least until the kid stumbles across some p0rn links or pictures of drunk 18 year old girls and quickly forgets all about his l337 hacking attempts.
Never trust anybody over 25!
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.
I grew up in Socal. Many people I knew would beige box 900 numbers to get time on a local BBS. Several got all sorts of gear, mostly paintball crap, through credit card numbers gained through dumpster diving. These were mostly 16-17 year olds doing the deed, with some doing it younger, but it's harder when you can't drive.
The temptation was huge but I managed to not give in. Heck, the temptation still is huge. Why work hard when you can make a few thousand in a few minutes? Oh yeah, because it's wrong. Sigh.
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).
Wow!! This is indeed dangerous:
"people start to swap malicious programs, knowledge and sometimes stolen data."
Where did they find the KNOWLEDGE in the first place ?
We need to fight at the source, find the KNOWLEDGE dealers and arrest them!
We need to make the fight against KNOWLEDGE a national priority, nominate a KNOWLEDGE tsar or something!
Will somebody think of the children!!
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."
Get off my law... HEY GIMME MY PANTS BACK!
Free Martian Whores!
I remember back in late 80s, things were getting out of hand with newbie kiddies just getting into hacking and phreaking and playing with credit card numbers and phone codes. They were creating too much noise that made investigations of bigger fish more difficult. So law enforcement folks got credit companies to bankroll Operation Sundevil, put up a sting BBS (Phoenix Fortress) and captured a tonn of minors, most of who had files with phone codes and credit card numbers because they shotgun downloaded everything that seemed "cool". There are a bunch of honeypot sites and rooms popping up now getting ready to reel in the next crop.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
That's why they're called /b/tards.