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Comment by vegabook | Hacker News Reader

Not sure that 15-year-old kids are any less competent at hacking than adults. What they may lack in experience, they compensate for with a fresh, original mind, and nothing-to-lose. We've seen this picture many times before. I'd suggest that TalkTalk would be less competent if the hacker had been a greybeard rather than a kid, because greybeard's IT stack and MO is entrenched, conventional, and defendable-against, unlike Kiddo over here whose mind will skateboard around the pros leaving them standing.

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Going by Kreb's analysis of the attack [1] it would appear that the breach was a run-of-the-mill SQL Injection attack. Proper security 1-0-1 stuff.

[1] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/talktalk-hackers-demanded...

fair enough, though I think the idea that 15-year-olds are somehow to be dismissed as greenhorns is incorrect. We surely have a disproportionate distribution skewed towards the young among the hackerati, even if we take into account the fact that 50+ age groups didn't have computers in their childhood.

I totally agree. The stuff I myself was doing at 15 was more sophisticated than the "security consultants" I talk to professionally even consider.

At that age you have intelligence, lack of considering consequences and importantly lots of time. That's a dangerous combination.

When you combine the potential lack of punishment for juveniles with the biological reality that prefrontal cortex development in adult humans doesn't really complete until the mid twenties, you get teenagers who don't think bad outcomes are possible, and whose brain is less capable of long term risk assessment.

I would think that the 50+ crowd would be far more hampered by their risk assessment of the negative outcomes of these behaviors than by their skillsets alone.

A teen is in it for the lulz, or the glory, or whatever, but a greybeard could lose his retirement, leave his spouse high and dry, lose his ability to see and support his family...

So they're less risk averse even if they're less competent. Probably right. Though I think there's also something intellectually liberating about having no risk constraints, which might allow for attack vectors that are unconventional.

What you should be really afraid of is 50 year olds without risk aversion. Like the decision-makers at banks, politicians who will never personally go to war or the welfare line, etc.

You would be suprised... There are startups out there who say "we don't care about an attack we're too small... we're going to write all of our sql by hand."

Just because they "write all of [their] sql by hand" doesn't mean they will be vulnerable to an attack as simple as this. This is just pure and unmitigated incompetence.

Yes. Preventing SQL injection attacks is very, very easy. To have something like that in your code in 2015 is inexcusable.

It's not just startups. The stuff I've seen at some very large companies would make you cringe.

As a colleague developer of mine says: I don't want any of my personal information on the internet because I know how developers think.

Sigh.

15 year olds also have a hell of a lot of time to invest in whatever takes their fancy. Never underestimate the single minded focus of an inquisitive teenager!

> they compensate for with a fresh, original mind, and nothing-to-lose

And time.

but mostly a false sense of invulnerability.

Man, when I think back to the stupid things I did on the internet as a teenager that simply earned me a glare or a stern warning email.... I'm so glad I was a teenager in the 90s, because if I'd done that shit today, I'd be in jail.

> because greybeard's IT stack and MO is entrenched, conventional, and defendable-against

this is utterly ridiculous

What is ridiculous about it? I have been coding for 30 years and am happy to pronounce that younger coders have a far more nimble mind than me. I'll destroy them on complex software engineering but I'm constantly impressed by their innovations. Anybody who finds this "ridiculous" is either a rare evergreen genius, or more likely, self-satisfyingly complacent.

I'm quite young and I'm curious about those "innovations" myself.

So you're still writing code in Delphi or maybe Zortech C++ ?

try Reddit. Your (zero insight) posts are not constructive here.

I think his point was you don't to be "entrenched" in an old stack.

How "nimble" your mind is really isn't important, and surely you don't think that a 15 year old can be more competent than you in a given stack.

It's just that you're not exposing yourself to the new stacks.

If it was my job to penetrate remote systems, you can bet that I wouldn't still be using the same stack and MO I was 30 years ago, in the just the same way that I'm not using an Amiga.

The OP is ridiculous that it cannot be imagined that someone needs to be a child to break into systems.

I'm at University and I run rings around my 20 something cohort.

The point is not that one needs to be a teenager ("child") to break into systems. None of what I have said is incompatible with the assertion that older coders have more skills, a point with which I agree. However it is not a contradiction to say that innovation does not require huge experience, and indeed is sometimes hampered by it.

I still stand by my original assertion :

> because greybeard's IT stack and MO is entrenched, conventional, and defendable-against

this is utterly ridiculous

I stand by my original assertion:

> this is utterly ridiculous

A vacant comment devoid of insight, by a self-satisfied person oblivious to their predisposition to complacency.

our HN colleagues think otherwise

We're still shipping Delphi, yes.

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