Hacker education: Know your enemy
But how do hackers stay on top of the latest trends in security? Is there some place that they train or do they have some other way of learning?
"The sorts of people that are active in the hacking world don't 'train' in the militaristic sense of the word to carry out so-called 'cybercrime'," says Bayley. "The sort of learning that goes on revolves around people taking an interest in a particular area and teaching themselves about it or learning from an established body of knowledge if one exists."
These areas of interest cover a variety of areas including software programming, system administration, network administration and hardware hacking.
Does the power of being a hacker create people that are more likely to commit cybercrime? Bayley doesn't think so.
"I don't believe this pushes people towards wanting to commit or actually commit 'cybercrimes'," explains Bayley. "The attraction [of hacking] isn't a [financial] reward--it's the technology itself, the access to it, and knowing your understanding is provably better than your peers."
Bayley also explains that for the type of people who conduct hacking it doesn't make sense for them to jeopardise themselves by cracking for financial reward. "Why would someone with an above average level of intelligence and a natural knack for picking up difficult and often obscure concepts want to risk a decent size salary with something that could lead to a criminal record at the very minimum or a prison sentence?" asks Bayley.
The term 'cybercrime', according to Bayley, is a highly-charged description of what actually occurs when organisations are defrauded. "It's not as flashy, but it's perhaps better termed as 'crime that happens to involve technology such as a computer'," says Bayley.
He also says that most cybercrime tends to be conducted by non-hackers. "Look around at the type of corporate fraud cases that are alleged to occur these days," says Bayley, "Most of them involve something like an accountant or other person in a position of authority using technology in the belief that their actions are obscured or more difficult to track."
"Very few of the people found to be doing this sort of thing are the sort of 'hackers' you're thinking about," explains Bayley. "Without wanting to sound too cliched, it's not a real hackers' mindset to want to steal, defraud or destroy information."
