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Hacker kids a growing concern for RCMP

Forget organized crime or well-financed cyber terrorists – the greatest threat to your network is likely a lone pre-teen holed up in a suburban basement, says a report from Canada’s top crime fighters.

The report, entitled Hackers: a Canadian police perspective, was written last May by officials at the criminal intelligence program, part of the RCMP’s criminal analysis branch. The report was only posted to the Web site last Thursday.

Findings reveal the Canadian hacker community is not only getting much savvier, it’s also getting much younger.

“Much to the surprise of most people, the typical network cracker is a 12 to 16-year old boy who found some cracking code on the Internet and decided to try it out,” the report says.

The report says a combination of youth and a high-level of comfort with computing systems make the new breed of hackers a particularly dangerous threat to networks.

“Unsophisticated or novice hackers are often young and they lack a sense of responsibility. They are unaware of the capabilities of the hacker tools they use, unaware of the implications of their hacking or unconcerned about the consequences of their actions,” the report concludes.

Young hackers are also more likely to launch network attacks than their older, wiser counterparts, the RCMP report says. It cites the case of Mafiaboy, the now 17-year-old Montreal teenager, who was convicted of launching distributed DoS (denial of service) attacks that immobilized Internet giants including CNN, eBay, Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and ETrade Group Inc. in February 2000, as an example.

The report says these “hackers” use chat rooms or other digital meeting forums to find disturbing forms of inspiration. “There is growing evidence to suggest that novice hackers are being counseled by on-line ‘mentors’ whose motivations are unknown to Canadian police at this time.”

Among the report’s other conclusions:

The full report is online at http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/crim_int/hackers_e.htm.

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