The Daily Telegraph

Teenage hackers get rehab to put their skills to good use – as defence against cyber crime

- By Cara Mcgoogan

TEENAGE hackers will be sent to cyber-crime rehab camps to transform them into security experts under a new National Crime Agency (NCA) scheme.

The law enforcemen­t agency will enrol teenagers who have been found committing cyber offences onto a programme designed to stop them from entering serious crime.

It comes amid growing fears that the skills of cyber criminals are outpacing the talents of the industry, which has struggled to attract new talent.

Teenagers who have been served with cautions or cease and desist orders will be invited to attend a workshop at the NCA as part of its Prevent scheme. Seven young men recently attended the first weekend of workshops under the rehab programme, which involved learning security skills and ways to earn money legitimate­ly through their talents.

The offenders had been arrested or visited by the NCA for committing cyber offences at home or school, including putting servers offline.

One of the group said he had begun experiment­ing when he accidental­ly hacked a primary school network, locking users out of the system. He later put his skills to malicious use, saying it was a method of getting away from bullying at school. The group were sent to a weekend camp in Bristol earlier this month.

“Cyber crime has become easier to commit with the proliferat­ion of easyto-access tools, tutorials and online forums to share ideas,” said Richard Jones, Prevent manager at the NCA. “Even the most basic forms of cyber crime can have huge impacts and the NCA and police will arrest and prosecute offenders, which can be devastatin­g to their future.

“That means there is great value in reaching young people before they become involved in cyber crime, and even those already on the fringes of criminalit­y – when their skills can still be a force for good.”

The idea for the scheme came from research that looked at the abilities of illegal hackers in comparison with those who worked in cyber security. It found that those on the right side of the law were very similar to the other group, but at some point a parent, guardian or teacher had intervened to put them on a law-abiding path.

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