Hacker in Your Child's Bedroom

Source: http://homeofthehacks.com/images/ hackingisnotacrime_web_hacking_is_not_a_crime.gif

Is there a hacker in your child's bedroom? I still remember a 13-year old me explaining to my Dad that kids at school were trading software for our brand new Apple //e, that you could get commercial software via modem download (ahh, Ascii Express Pro (AEPro)) and that I needed a fast 2400 baud modem to get in on the show.

My father was a retired police officer. Imagine that conversation. Got it? Ok....

Now, the alarm has been raised on teenage hackers. Has anything changed in all this time? Are we still criminalizing software piracy? Uhh...yeah. But it continues to flourish and the young are being subverted, aren't they?

"Hasta la vista!" you yell as you watch the police drive away, your middle school student in handcuffs.

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."
Read Source via Slashdot

Credit card trading is wrong, isn't it? So, why do eleven year olds do it? What AREN'T we teaching kids in schools today? Let's see....

We found a student with a 65 page listing of proxies, many of which were not in our filter (Iprism) nor in the Service Center's filter (8e6).
Source: Email from a Texas Technology Director to colleagues

Peace....

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