ITinfo: How Do They Find The Time To Do That?

Teens Crack Too Much

How do they learn to do it so well?

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How Do They Find The Time To Do That?

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

There's no one answer as to how teens are able to crack in to ultra-secure information servers, but three factors seem to separate the young people from their older counterparts:

a willingness to use easy-to-use scripting toolkits that are readily available on the net
easy accessibility to a wide range of technical information
plenty of time to learn, practice, and hone their cracking skills

The Coordination Center at CERT (Center for Computer Emergency Response Team) at Carnegie Mellon University reports over 26,000 computer intrusion incidents occurred and were reported in the first three months of this year. That's more than in all of last year.

The adolescent lack of finely-developed ethical thinking seems to be a major contributor to the increase in teenage cybercrime. Teens don't think of hacking as a legal trespass, and their cracking often has a social instigation. Plus young people have more free time on their hands than do adults who are holding down a job, managing life responsibilities, and building a career for themselves.

Dave's Opinion

The question of how do teens learn to hack into systems came up in a graduate e-business seminar I taught last week. I got to thinking about it and I recognized that when I was a teenager I had much more free time to pursue my interests and I felt a strong competitive urge to be the best at my hobbies. By time I entered college and later the military, the requirements imposed by my schedule precluded me from investing as much time and effort into my avocations.

Maybe we should be encouraging teens to keep busy participating in socially-acceptable activities with more adult supervision.

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References

CERT
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updated April 22, 2002
http://dgl.com/itinfo/2002/it020422.html