Rise of the teen cyber-criminal is challenge of a generation for police Midland detective leading fight against online crime reveals the scale of the task

ASPECIALIST team of detectives investigating cybercrime attacks has tracked down hacking suspects in the West Midlands as young as 13.

Last year the region’s cybercrime unit investigated 24 complex cases, ranging from lone wolf students bringing down college websites to organised crime gangs trading stolen credit card details on the ‘Dark Web’.

The six biggest investigations involved an estimated 1.7 million victims and 300,000 offenders dotted around the world. The police probe led to arrests in the UK, Europe, US and Hong Kong – with many offenders found to be children.

Detective Inspector Rob Harris leads the cybercrime team that sits within the Birmingham’s Regional Organised Crime Unit.

In an interview with the Post, he described the threat of cybercrime as the biggest challenge police have faced in a generation.

“The evidence we have got from the last two or three years is that there is certainly an element of younger people who don’t necessarily understand the full consequences of their actions,” said Det Insp Harris. “From the 300,000 suspects, a fair amount of them are children.

“It may well be they got into gaming to begin with. They may have then hung around on the wrong bit of the internet where they have been encouraged to do some hacking to test their skills. We often do cease and desist visits if it has been very low-level activity and they have not caused much harm or risk.

“But if it goes on unchecked, they have potential to progress on to much bigger things.”

Police are looking to bring in two cybercrime prevention officers to the West Midlands this year with the aim of trying to prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place.

The prevention element will be part of a national network and will become big in 2017/18.

“The idea is to try to identify these people and perhaps to say to them that cyber security is an option for them,” said Det Insp Harris.

Shockingly, the youngest person his team has come across as part of an investigation was aged just 13 – and the young hacker’s online skills were “really very good”.

“These young people are often from middle-class backgrounds,” said Det Insp Harris. “But there is no real stereotypical person committing this crime, it’s a real mixed bag.

“We have organised criminality from areas in middle Europe, eastern Europe and Russian-speaking language states. But, closer to home, we are also finding that people involved in traditional criminality have started moving across into cybercrime.

“The entry level is very different to how it used to be. If you wind the clock back 10 years you had to be a decent hacker or coder.

“The problem we have now is there is a marketplace and we have people who are selling malware kits and they are making it easier for people to get into cybercrime.

“If you take the denial of service cases that we are looking at, we have evidence that you could start committing cyber criminality from as little as £5 by just accessing tools that somebody else has created for you.

“That is why we have been targeting the facilitators.”

Cybercrime was previously a hidden crime but Det Insp Harris said around half of all crime is now indicated to be online in some form.

He added: “One of the complexities we have from that is with reporting. We do know that people are confused by reporting. They don’t know how or where to report it, or even if they should report it.

“There have been cases of people who have been personally affected by hacking – maybe blackmailed over explicit images – and victims who’ve even taken their own lives due to the stress and threats made against them. That’s how serious it can be.”