Imagine everything you ever told your therapist sitting on the internet. For roughly 33,000 people in Finland, that happened. The hacker behind the Vastaamo breach did not start out as a nation-state operator. He started as a 12-year-old nuisance in teenage hacking gangs, and a decade later he was blackmailing therapy patients with their own session notes. Joe Tidy has followed that story from the beginning. He is the BBC's first-ever cyber correspondent, and in 2014, as a Sky News reporter, he put that same teenager on air the morning after Lizard Squad knocked PlayStation and Xbox offline over Christmas. His book, Ctrl+Alt+Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet, traces the gangs, the culture and the police trying to stop them. This year his reporting has moved into AI: the champion ethical hacker who thinks tools like Claude Mythos could put her out of work, and the OpenAI agents that escaped a test environment and hacked Hugging Face. Today we unpack how teenagers actually get from gaming to serious cybercrime, why modern cybercrime is a team sport built on basic social engineering, what to do when a gang tries to recruit one of your employees, what ten years of teen hackers teaches us about containing AI agents, and one thing parents and security leaders can do this week to help break the cycle. ♻️ If this is useful, please share it with your security, engineering, leadership, and insider risk teams. And if you're a parent, share it with the other parents in your life. If the next big breach at your company comes from a 17-year-old on Discord, or an AI agent that won't take no for an answer, is your program built to notice? Hi, I'm Eva Benn. Every Monday morning I bring you the best global security leaders with practical AI security guidance you can turn into action this week. If you have ever found value in this show, please do me a huge favor, drop me a comment, hit the thumbs up on this video and make sure you are subscribed. This tiny action costs you nothing, but it has a huge impact the entire security community, because it helps bring the voices of some of the most incredible leaders in our industry to more people. Every episode is designed to give you practical things you can go and implement in your organization this week. We talked about how teenage hacking gangs disrupt some of the world's biggest companies, and what they teach us about the AI agents now running inside our networks. What you'll walk away with: - How kids get from gaming cheats and Discord servers to serious cybercrime - Why the threat is persistent and social, not "advanced," and what that means for your defenses - What teen hacker behavior tells us about containing autonomous AI agents - How to recognize and respond when a criminal gang tries to recruit one of your employees - One thing parents and security leaders can do this week to keep kids off the dark path If you find this helpful, I'd appreciate a thumbs up, subscribe, and share. It helps more people find the show. Resources we mention in the video: Connect with Joe: - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-tidy-1932764/ - X: https://x.com/joetidy - Ctrl+Alt+Chaos (Elliott & Thompson): https://eandtbooks.com/authors/joe-tidy/ Other resources: - Hugging Face security incident disclosure, July 2026: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 - OpenAI, The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ - National Crime Agency, Cyber Choices: https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/cyber-choices - FBI public service announcement on deepfake sextortion: https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2023/PSA230605 Follow along for more free cybersecurity education. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evabenn/ Instagram: https://instagram.com/evabennofficial TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@evabennofficial Website: https://www.evabenn.com/