Children hack friends' and family's online accounts

Children appear to have little concern about accessing their friends' or their family's social networking, email account or online bank accounts without permission, according to research by Trend Micro.

Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at Trend Micro, said children were finding it easy to do this because people are still too free with the personal information they post online.

In a survey of 500 children and 500 parents the security company found 40 per cent of teens had gained access to someone else's social networking profile this way.

A further 10 per cent also said they thought it was "cool" or "funny" to impersonate them and 70 per cent admitted they had done this.

Teenage boys were more likely to hack into a social networking profile. Girls are more 'light fingered'; with the company saying they are more likely to access other people's online shopping accounts and even bank accounts without permission.

"It’s not hard for a child to reset someone’s password and gain access to a social networking or Paypal account via Ebay because most of the information needed to do this is on a social networking profile," he said.

He said there were many applications on social networking sites that could also be used to obtain the information required. One example includes a questionnaire that is sent out to friends on Facebook asking them to list 25 things about themselves. This includes their first kiss, the name of their first teacher and their first love.

"All these answers can then be used when resetting a password as these are normally the questions you are asked when you forget a password on these sites, " Mr Ferguson said.

He also backed up the company’s research claiming he had seen evidence of children boasting about hacking into people’s accounts on Twitter. We found an update, which appeared to back up the company's claim. It read: "Someone is hacking my brother's msn, his fault, gave his password to everyone."

To ensure they keep their children safe online parents are advised to teach their children to have multiple passwords that are not associated with names, nicknames or commonly found information over the internet.