Teenage Mutant Ninja Hackers

Not the most original title, I realise, but at least you know what I’m going to talk about.

A while back, I mentioned cyber-crime, so I’m fairly happy that this makes me seem relatively on the ball here, as security consultants have recently highlighted a sharp rise in teenagers getting involved with the more serious aspects of online crime.

Not content with drinking cider in bus-stops or mugging old ladies anymore, the little rascals – as young as 11 apparently – begin with milder stuff, like dealing in computer game hacks, before winding up trying to send malicious viruses, scamming, using phishing kits and exchanging stolen ID and credit card data. Great stuff.

The one “good” thing about all this, I suppose, is that the little darlings nearly ALWAYS get caught, because of a total lack of knowledge; this includes managaging to infect their own computers with their viruses right the way through to videoing themselves being master criminals and posting it to Youtube… under the same alias they just used to hack a site or run a phishing scam. They also share photos and personal details of their life online which makes it very easy computer security experts to track them down and get them arrested.

Words fail me at this point…