Amazing how smart kids are!

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

A Montreal fifth grader pleaded guilty this week to hacking multiple government and public websites for the web collective Anonymous in exchange for computer games. According to the Toronto Sun, the boy — dressed in his school uniform and accompanied by his father — told court officials that he had played a part in a 2012 hacking raid on sites that included the Montreal Police Department, the Quebec Board of Public Health, the Chilean federal government and others.

The court did not reveal the boy’s name, but the Sun said he lives in the suburb of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and that his actions were not motivated out of political interest or intent, but that he seized classified information for Anonymous for fun and to get new video games.

He will be sentenced in November.

The young hacker has reportedly been interested in computers since the age of nine. He used a combination of techniques to access and crash the websites he hacked and posted instructions and warnings to other hackers about the sites.

Other Anonymous members have been arrested for the hacking raids, but the Montreal boy was purportedly the tip of the organization’s spear, able to dismantle and overrun secure networks faster and better than any of the hacktivist collective’s in-house talent.

“He saw it as a challenge, he was only 12 years old,” the boy’s lawyer said in court. “There was no political purpose.”

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So I thought this was pretty interesting. A 12 year old doing something that a team of older people weren’t capable of? To me this is just another in a long list of things that lend weight to the idea that kids are born ‘cable ready’, so to speak.

Information that has taken us generations to learn, is sort of ‘pre-programmed’ into these new generations. An awesome concept. What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below, and if you liked the article, share it around. =)

You can read the original article, written by David Ferguson, here.