One thing that particularly interested, or rather startled me this week, was the article on the obsolescence of passwords. Essentially, Honan details the various groups that are stealing our information, and the one that struck me as especially disturbing- teenagers. Honan says that a large number of the sophisticated hackers are teenagers who are doing it “for fun”. Which raises the question “why is it fun?” At what point is basically taking someones life and turning it upside down rewarding or entertaining in any shape or form?

When discussing these teenagers whom have hacked, Honan states that the majority of them began on the online gaming scene, where they began hacking to get better user names, content, etc. and from there they continue to grow. My question is what is the motive to continue? How does one make the leap from taking a user name to hacking a persons bank accounts? If i had to personally try and explain it, my guess would be that it may be the desire of teenagers to one-up each other, or to gain bragging rights. However, one may surmise that the desire of teenagers to hack comes from the teen-aged desire for a community. Hackers that work in groups (such as UGNazi), work together to hack into these massive databases, and share both the risk and the reward. Therefore, they may feel like they belong to this group and will take on bigger and bolder hacks to continue to grow both their relationship.

Nevertheless, despite their reasoning, the teen-aged hacker will always be a great threat to cyber security as once someone creates a system that they feel is useful, it is simply defeated by someone younger and more tech-savvy. If we want to truly eliminate teen-aged hackers, or at least decrease their numbers, maybe we should look at not only the topical reasons they hack (because its fun), but maybe examine some of the potential underlying reasons-such as a desire for a community- and work with these youth to address the issues that led them to take up hacking in the first place.