Organized cybercriminal groups of all kinds have added a new line of defense to hide behind. This time, it is young teenagers in countries such as the UK and the US. Like so many modern-day Fagins, they are grooming online gamers as young as 10 to hack the games to acquire more tokens.
They then encourage them to use their new-found and easily acquired hacking skills to break into other more heavily secured and potentially far more lucrative websites, paralleling the modus operandi used by Victorian street criminals.
“I never saw a sharper lad. Here’s a shilling for you. If you go on, in this way, you’ll be the greatest man of the time,” says Charles Dickens’ Fagin in Oliver Twist.
By adopting such Nineteenth-Century criminal grooming methods to the online world of the Twenty-First Century, today’s threat actors are effectively criminalizing an entire generation not to pick pockets but to rifle fat online crypto wallets instead. When the media reports that a nineteen-year-old hacker has been arrested at his parent’s house for a major hack, such as the one that recently occurred at Transport for London (TfL), the sinister cybercriminals who may have orchestrated the cyber-attack doubtless breathe a sigh of relief.
“What the police should be asking in a case like is who has been grooming the teenage hacker and for how many years?” says Fergus Hay, CEO and co-founder of one-year-old UK start-up The Hacking Games, whose aim is to use online gaming, TV and other media to encourage teenagers away from a life of online crime and towards careers in ethical hacking.
80 percent of NYC 16-year-olds have already tried hacking
“With the cost of Cybercrime forecasted to be $23 trillion in 2027, and 80 percent of NYC Teens polled having tried hacking before they were 16 years old, we are facing a generational crisis,” warns Hay.
He adds that the global labor deficit of 12 million unfilled jobs in Cybersecurity forecasted by 2027 is a shameful iniquity when there such as vast pool of untapped talent lying largely unused in Gen Z, the under-30s, in countries such as the UK and the US.
Hay quotes a real-life example of a 13-year-old who began his hacking career at the age of 10 by going on YouTube to learn how to hack more tokens from an online game he had been playing. He then decided to hack other websites and found his victims were following a digital trail he had purposely laid to claim kudos for his hacks and were offering him money. At first, this comprised relatively small payments of up to £500.
But the young British hacker soon acquired a taste for getting rich online. By the time he was 13 years old and his parents decided to investigate why he was spending so much time on his computer, he had already amassed $14 million in various online bank accounts set up using an adult alias that he had easily acquired on the Dark Web.
“The mother said she was scared people would think that her 13-year-old boy was a criminal, and all I could think was that in the eye of the law, he most likely is,” says Hay.
But Hay believes it is possible to save youngsters like this from going down a slippery criminal slope by encouraging them to take up a career as white-hat ethical hackers or penetration testers sounding out the security perimeters of all kinds of organizations from hospitals to airports. He adds that most young hackers are not naturally criminally minded and that if they are shown a path where they can make legitimate money using their creativity and access to technology, they will choose the direction of ethical hacking.
Of course, hacking games are not new. Released as early as 2014 by Ubisoft, Watch Dogs, for example, immerses players in a modern open-world environment where they control a hacker seeking revenge. Using a smartphone as his primary tool, the hacker manipulates the city’s infrastructure to achieve his goals, blending action, strategy, and tech prowess.
But The Hacking Games is not only creating an online gaming platform for the amusement of users but also using it to deter them from engaging in online crime and harnessing their online skills for legitimate purposes.
