AUSTRALIAN Federal Police ''interventions'' are aiming to turn teen hackers into cyber-crime fighters.

A News Limited investigation has discovered that the AFP has been monitoring hacking forums for tech-savvy teenagers in the hope of guiding them away from a path of crime.

Children as young as 15 are being identified.

It's hoped these clever teens can be coaxed into later joining authorities in the fight against cyber thieves and vandals.

''We have had a series of interventions over time where we will go out and explain . . . what they're doing and how that could actually get themselves into serious trouble if they continue on the way they're going,'' Australian Federal Police cyber crime operations coordinator Superintendent Brad Marden told News Limited.

He said reactions were generally positive.

''And at some stage in their future if they've got that interest in crime and we've obviously managed to stop them from doing anything particularly criminal at a younger age, they would be the kind of people who may end up working for us one day in the future.''

The revelation that child hackers are using coding skills to hack accounts on social media and also to breach government websites comes as a senior lecturer in law and IT warned universities needed to do more to ensure they are not training the next generation of computer criminals.

In March, Reserve Bank of Australia confirmed its computer networks had been repeatedly hacked in a series of cyber-attacks to infiltrate sensitive internal information, including by Chinese developed malicious software - or malware.

Hackers penetrated computers at the Reserve Bank in an email scam targeting employees in an incident in November 2011 but details only emerged this year.

And late last year, the AFP helped Romanian officials charge 10 people in the Eastern European country over Australia's largest credit card data theft.

A criminal syndicate had access to 500,000 credit cards and had already spent $30 million on 30,000 of them in transactions in Hong Kong, Europe, Australia and the US.

Superintendent Marden confirmed officers policed hacking forums where up-and-comers sharpened their skills before potentially joining syndicates that hack financial information.

Police track down under 18s, turn up at their door and discuss their online pursuits with them and their parents.

Superintendent Marden said the youngest teen police had spoken to was 15, but they had come across people in forums as young as 13.

''People are getting into these forums quite young,'' he said.

''By the time they get to over 18, they've probably been doing it for quite a while.''

Meanwhile, Sydney University of Technology senior lecturer John Taggart said it was a challenge for universities to train law enforcement without turning out hackers.

He wants ethics better addressed by educators.

Mr Taggart said people who would fight cyber crime needed to understand how hackers compromise security in order to police it.

But there was the possibility those valuable skills may be sought out by criminals, he said.

''If you are going to examine the subject, there's a line there between looking at it and seeing how it's done for the purposes of catching criminals and perhaps going across the line and encouraging people to become criminals or giving them the tools whereby they could,'' he said.

Mr Taggart said people who understood the cyber world were in high demand from authorities.

''They're sought after and they're quite rare . . . so I can only assume the same sort of thing goes on amongst the criminals,'' he said.