Tech-y teens, often more curious than criminal, are likely to start turning their talents to cyberdeviance and cybercrime at about age 15, with such activities peaking at about age 18.

Thats according to a snapshot survey by University of Cincinnati researchers who will present their findings Nov. 21 at The American Society of Criminology annual conference in Atlanta.

Researchers Mark Stockman, UC associate professor of information technology; Thomas Holt, associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University; and UC criminal justice doctoral students William Mackey and Michael Holiday participated in a survey of 274 university students in both computing-oriented majors and non-computing majors to ask them about their teen activities related to 25 specific cyberdeviance activities or cybercrimes.

In that survey, 71 percent of all respondents reported having engaged in at least a cyberdeviance activity as a teen.

Said Stockman, The most-common form of what we call cyberdeviant behavior consisted of guessing at a password to gain access to a wireless network, followed by guessing at anothers password, and knowingly accessing a wired network without authorization.

And, he added, this cyberdeviance might not be such a bad thing, as these are just the types of activities  as well as many others  that information technology programs teach and government and business-sponsored cyber competitions encourage and even reward talented students for. The ultimate goal, after all, is to prepare students for high-paying IT jobs in tech security in order to fight off bad-guy hackers, many of whom are based overseas.