Teenage hackers are on the rise, and they’re more dangerous than you think

Unless we find a way to keep kids off this dark path of cybercrime, this won’t go away.

[Photo: Peterzayda/Adobe Stock]

BY Next Big Idea Club

Below, Joe Tidy shares five key insights from his new book, Ctrl + Alt + Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet.

Tidy is the BBC’s first cyber correspondent and a leading voice on cybercrime. He has covered major global cyberattacks and produced widely viewed international documentaries, including a high-profile investigation into Russia’s most wanted cybercriminal.

Teenage hackers are quietly reshaping cybercrime. They’re not movie-style geniuses, but persistent, socially connected, and often addicted—causing real harm through data breaches and feeding a cycle that leads to ever more serious attacks.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Tidy himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea app.

1. Data breaches can really harm people.

Data breaches—from a company to your social media accounts—are something we have trouble gauging the magnitude of. Everyone wants to know, Should I be worried? You may be thinking that surely your phone number, email address, and real address are already out there, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal. But whether you should care about a data breach is a really difficult question to answer. In some cases, they can cause serious harm and damage.

The cruelest cyberattack in history was on the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center in Finland. Vastaamo was a big and important organization with dozens of pop-up mental health centers around the country. In 2018, hacker Julius Kivimäki found a way into the servers of the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center chain and stole all the data he could find. He stole the usual kinds of information—names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers—but he also stole the patient notes; 33,000 people had their data stolen in this way.

I can’t think of a worse data set to be in the hands of a criminal extortionist than what I tell my therapist. Bear in mind, the people who were affected by this were already vulnerable. They were struggling with mental health issues. Some of them were in depression or anxiety when Kivimäki snuck in one night and stole all that data. With it, he tried to extort Ville Tapio, the CEO of Vastaamo, for 100,000 euros worth of Bitcoin.

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