CybercrimeCyberdeviance, cybercrime start and peak in the teen years
A snapshot survey indicates that cyberdeviance and cybercrime start among teens at about age 15 and peak at about age 18. This is in line with the traditional onset and peak ages for other types of misdemeanor and criminal offenses.
Amateur hacking is a pursuit of the teen // Source: sophos.com
Tech-y teens, often more curious than criminal, are likely to start turning their talents to cyberdeviance and cybercrime at about age 15, with such activities peaking at about age 18.
This is according to a snapshot survey by University of Cincinnati researchers who will present their findings 21 November at the American Society of Criminology annual conference in Atlanta. A University of Cincinnati release reports that researchers Mark Stockman, UC associate professor of information technology; Thomas Holt, associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University; and UC criminal justice doctoral students William Mackey and Michael Holiday participated in a survey of 274 university students in both computing-oriented majors and non-computing majors to ask them about their teen activities related to twenty-five specific cyberdeviance activities or cybercrimes.
In that survey, 71 percent of all respondents reported having engaged in at least a cyberdeviance activity as a teen.
Said Stockman, “The most-common form of what we call cyberdeviant behavior consisted of guessing at a password to gain access to a wireless network, followed by guessing at another’s password, and knowingly accessing a wired network without authorization.”
And, he added, this cyberdeviance might not be such a bad thing, as these are just the types of activities — as well as many others — that information technology programs teach and government and business-sponsored cyber competitions encourage and even reward talented students for. The ultimate goal, after all, is to prepare students for high-paying IT jobs in tech security in order to fight off bad-guy hackers, many of whom are based overseas.
The survey also asked respondents about their motivations when it came to any of these activities. According to Stockman, the motivation tended to be curiosity or a joke on a friend: “The respondents reported wanting to test out software or to solve a computer logic puzzle or to play a joke on a friend. Sometimes, they wanted to help improve a system’s security, or they felt it was wrong for a hotel to charge $15 for wireless access.”
Stockman and his fellow researchers plan to expand their survey’s numbers and to conduct it annually because he believes that the onset age for computerdeviance and cybercrime will trend downward in years to come.
