by Daisy Peasblossom

Created on: January 29, 2010

Whether or not today’s youth are more likely to “hack” depends in large part upon the definition of hacking.  Old school hackers define this as taking apart programs to see what makes them tick and exploring secure systems just so they can say they have been there.  They call the persons (of all ages) who utilize programming for financial gain or for malicious intent “crackers”.  The distinction may be fine, but it is a real one and needs to be considered when examining this question.

I will have to say that today’s youth are more likely to engage in hacking activities simply because of the increased availability of electronic devices.  Some of them may not even call their activity “hacking”; it may be something as limited and simple as getting past the security program mom or dad have placed on the family computer.  With today’s environment of most homes having two working parents or being a single parent home, more middle-school children are latch-key children.  These youngsters are left on their own for large blocks of time, with access to the family electronics—whether these be smart-phone, digital TV, personal computers or other devices.  Availability and unsupervised time are the greatest resources for the youthful hacker.

Unfortunately, today’s youth may be doing less programming to actually achieve their goals.  In researching for this article, my Google search pulled up 3,920,000 results for “kids hacking”.  When I narrowed the search to “how to hack”, the resultant 37,900,000 search results is scarcely smaller.  The top page listed a tutorial, how to hack into an electronic coke machine, a windows password hack, and instructions for hacking into someone’s webcam and using it to spy on them.  With this sort of instructional material so readily available, you can bet that unsupervised youngsters will be trying it out!

Even supervised youngsters are going to be miles ahead of parents and teachers in their computing abilities.  Very few of us past the age of forty could be considered digital natives.  Even my oldest child, who is a computer professional, was introduced to the medium in his early teens; my grandchildren, however, have grown up in a household boasting multiple computers, cell phones and other electronic devices.  Many parents (and I was guilty of this) become reliant on

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