Children. Be very, very afraid.

I am sitting in on a presentation by Sam McQuade, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has a fascinating line of research at RIT on K-12 and cyber crime and victimization. Anybody remember my story from my first days out of school? I wrote it up in detail over at CIOUpdate. In short, I experienced first hand industrial espionage and theft of a specialized tool I needed to fabricate the Buick car seat I was working on. That led me to wonder about the current generations of graduates who I assumed were well versed in hacking techniques. My concern is that as we hire these kids they could increase the likelihood that our organizations could be caught up in hacking attempts.

Professor McQuade in his field work encountered: anonymous email bomb threats, downloading of pornography to cell phones in the hallway, pirated movie downloads, credit card theft, etc. He surveyed 13,773 students in his computer crime and victimization survey.

No surprises here. In the 7th-8th graders surveyed for instance: 21% have lied online about their age, 10% pretended to be someone else, 7% have circumvented security measures, 5% have used IT devices to cheat on school work.

One interesting result is that he found juvenile high-tech crime offenders tend to specialize. They are either good data miners, hackers, crackers, etc.

Professor McQuade's overall message is that our school kids are involved in vibrant, sometimes dangerous online communities. In other words cyber space mirrors the playground. My message is that the behavior picked up in the digital school yard is going to carry over to the workplace. We will be expending much greater IT resources in the future to enforce acceptable behavior in our workforce.