The Rise of Youth Cybercrime: Social Trends and Interventions
The actions that lead to cybercrime are increasingly insidious and commonplace, with devastating consequences for victims and perpetrators.
This brief explores the evolution of youth cybercrime as both a social and technological phenomenon, differentiating between cyber-enabled crimes and cyber-dependent crimes.
Cyber-enabled crimes include fraud, phishing, and identity theft, while cyber-dependent crimes include ransomware, botnets, and zero-day exploitation.
The barriers to entry for both have been radically lowered by artificial intelligence (AI) and resulting crime-as-a-service (CaaS) platforms that offer hacking tools via subscription model.
Through case studies, the brief illustrates the speed, coordination, and scale of youth involvement in cybercrime today, which is part of a broader trend that includes social onboarding pathways, peer-to-peer recruitment, and reputation-based ecosystems.
These ecosystems transform curiosity into participation, and participation into escalation.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and crime-as-a-service (CaaS) platforms have lowered the barriers to entry for cybercrime.
Author's summary: Youth cybercrime is a growing social and technological phenomenon.