The motivations and targets of teenage hackers have evolved over the past 10 to 15 years, from an almost philanthropic nature to a greater focus on personal wealth and status. That’s according to Joe Tidy, cyber correspondent at the BBC.
“Teenage hacking culture has changed,” says Tidy. From the 1980s through to early 2000s, teenage hackers were often ‘grey hats', “mainly there to make the internet better and to embarrass big companies”.
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However, in the 2010s, there was a shift, which he attributes to the availability of Bitcoin, the rise of Twitter and the evolution of online live chat services. “The space now breeds cruel, money-grabbing and power-hungry individuals,” he adds.
As well as financial gain, today’s teenage hackers are also interested in “chaos, online infamy and power – they want to be the big name in their community, on Discord or Telegram”.
He says: “LulzSec was the first group that showed that you can get kids around the world to come together, make a logo, make a Twitter feed and make headlines. From then, I think every group has been less interested in making the internet safer.”
Tidy has been researching the topic of teenage hackers for several years and says there are numerous examples of attacks that show how callous the current generation has become. He highlights the 2018 breach of the Vastaamo psychotherapy chain of clinics in Finland, by Julius Aleksanteri Kivimäki. The details of 33 000 patients were exfiltrated, including therapists’ confidential notes. After attempts to extort the chain failed, Kivimäki e-mailed patients directly, threatening to reveal their records. Tidy says lawyers in Finland have linked two suicides to the hacker’s actions, which targeted many vulnerable individuals.
The case provides a lesson in what can happen when unchallenged hackers flourish online without effective police intervention, says Tidy. “Kivimäki had a very storied career that started when he was a teenager. I first interviewed him 10 years ago, when he was 17 and part of a teenage hacking gang. I've been tracking his pathway from being a gaming-obsessed teenager to one of the most wanted criminals in the world.”
Overall, Tidy says teenage hackers are lazy and are not innovating with new technologies, but usually employ tried-and-tested social engineering techniques to gain entry into an organisation’s digital environments.
What does Tidy’s research say the future holds for those young people, usually men, caught up in hacking?
“A chunk of teenage hackers drop out naturally – they find girls, alcohol and sport. But then you have these individuals who are, in many respects, addicted to cyber crime. One researcher I talked to calls them the ‘centres of gravity’ of these communities; they're not the most skilled but they're the ones that are the most dedicated to anarchy, chaos and earning money. Those individuals will either get arrested or they'll move into even more serious cyber crime.”
Tidy will present his research on the rising threat of teenage hacking gangs at the Johannesburg leg of ITWeb’s Security Summit 2026, on 2 June, at the Sandton Convention Centre.
For more information, visit the Security Summit site.
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