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Teens turning to e-crime?

Security researchers report that more and more teenagers are turning to making trouble online, although many aren’t very good at it.

By Nicole Kobie, 28 Oct 2008 at 09:44

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Forget standing on street corners looking ominous – teenagers are starting to make trouble online, according to a report in the BBC.

Increasing numbers of teenagers are taking up e-crime, posting stolen data online and looking for ways to holes in games and social networks, but many aren’t very good at it.

"I see kids of 11 and 12 sharing credit card details and asking for hacks," Chris Boyd, director of malware research at FaceTime Security, told the BBC.

But he added: "Some are quite crude, some are clever and some are stupid.”

Kevin Hogan, a manager Symantec Security Response, said his firm has seen phishing sites which reference a file on the C: drive – which means the link won’t work – and said researchers have found many teenagers who have ruined their own computers trying to write viruses.

And even those who can successfully write malware are easy to track, as they are driven by a desire for attention to film and post their attacks on sites such as YouTube, Boyd said.

For more on this, check out our security writer Asavin Wattanajantra's blog here.

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Teenage cyber-criminals run riot !!!1!

A new generation of \"online hoodies\" is wreaking havoc in cyberspace, Internet security experts are warning.

The hackers, some as young as 12, begin by breaking into newspaper production systems and replacing news of substance with ridiculous headlines such as \"Scientists discover breasts cause cancer,\" \"Sexism confirmed by evolutionary biologists,\" \"Sarah Palin exists\" or \"Online hoodies stalking the web\" in an attempt to outrage people into clicking on them.

When they do, the ridiculous message promptly causes a buffer overload in the reader\'s brain, filling it with an overflow of nonsense and causing them to think such ideas are reasonable, sane and even interesting. In the final stages of an infection, the victim clicks repeatedly on TMZ, hoping for upskirt shots of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.

Hacker \"wins\" of late have included breaking into the Republican National Committee and replacing its phone scripts with patently insane slanders and mudslinging against Barack Obama, and engineering the hilarious placement of an idiot Alaskan redneck as a Vice-Presidential candidate.

\"We need them out on the streets,\" said Kevin Hogan of Symantec, \"using their energy and practicing their knife skills, not sitting at home getting obese.\"

My blog rant: http://tinyurl.com/54t2un

By dgerard on Wednesday Oct 29

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