DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [121]
Finally, there is the critical issue of hackers’ relationships. Most – but not all – hackers find it much easier to form relationships in the impersonal environment of the Internet than they do in real life. The interesting question is why.
Hackers usually enter the fray as adolescents, exactly at the time when a great majority find it difficult to establish relationships, especially with the opposite sex. So, at least in part, their difficulties in this area are entirely natural. But Chiesa has also identified that an abnormally high number of hackers have described problems in communicating with family, above all with their parents.
Reading Chiesa’s research and having spent a great deal of time interviewing different types of hackers put me in mind of the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University. His pioneering work on autism has led to a deeper understanding of the spectrum of male/female behavioural patterns. In essence, typical males show an enhanced ability to ‘systematise’ the external world, whereas typical females show a greater skill at ‘empathising’. This is not to say that all women are poor map-readers and that all men are hopeless listeners, merely that there is a pronounced tendency in each gender towards either ‘systematising’ among men or ‘empathising’ among women.
Baron-Cohen’s subsequent research led to him uncovering a link between the extreme male mind, which in certain circumstances could be described as ‘autistic’, and high levels of testosterone to which a foetus may be exposed in the womb. His thesis is controversial, but in many respects convincing, and without question of value when considering hackers and their behavioural patterns. Hackers are not, of course, all autistic; in fact very few of them are (although some celebrated ones, such as Gary McKinnon, wanted in the United States for hacking into the Pentagon, have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome). But they do appear to conform to many of the clinical observations recorded by Professor Baron-Cohen of personalities who sit quite far down the ‘male’ end of the spectrum.
With further research, this could mean that it will be possible to identify hacker personality types among children who are still at school. In this way, peers and mentors could encourage their skills while, at the same time, offering them ethical guidance so that their abilities can be channelled in positive directions. The word ‘hacker’ tends to carry pejorative overtones. But the capacity to hack is in fact an asset, both personal and societal. Computers and networks will never be safe if they are not protected by advanced hackers. Some such individuals are already working to that end. In my experience, 90 per cent of the hackers involved in criminal activities expressed a powerful desire to work within the licit security industry – and, even with a criminal conviction, they should surely be given the chance.
Adewale Taiwo, aka Freddybb
On 1st January 2009 Adewale Taiwo was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment by Hull Crown Court for conspiracy to defraud between June 2004 and February 2008. He had pleaded guilty the previous November to one count, having already admitted to defrauding just under £600,000 from bank accounts around the world. The judge recommended that, on completion of his sentence, he be deported to Nigeria.
With time discounted for good behaviour, Taiwo was due for release on 29th August 2010. Two weeks earlier he had appeared in court in Grimsby, across the Humber estuary from Hull. This was a hearing stipulated by Britain’s Proceeds of Crime Act, one of Tony Blair’s rare sensible amendments to the criminal-justice system, which enables the state to recover assets from criminals. It was a farcical end to a serious case. The prosecutor had mislaid a key file, triggering an unexpected reaction from the bearded Judge Graham Robinson, whose initial good humour quickly turned sour. He announced that he was not going to reschedule the hearing and so the two