For the past few weeks, a hacker collective called LulzSec has been leading American and British authorities a merry dance. The group's targets are seemingly random – Sony, the CIA, contestants of a reality TV show, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – but their stated motive has remained constant: "we're doing it for laughs", or, to put it in internet parlance, "lulz".

If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there's almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not "hacked" in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic – a so-called "distributed denial-of-service" (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a monkey could launch a DDoS attack – except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.

Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it's no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.

Still, what LulzSec might lack in technical prowess, it certainly makes up for in its ability to grab attention. Hackers have always boasted of their work – leaving messages on their victims' servers, posting proof of their exploits on bulletin boards‚ so in a world where every criminal and his dog has a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan-page it's hardly surprising that LulzSec is obsessed with online publicity. The group has been particularly smart in their use of Twitter: in less than two months it has amassed over 240,000 followers which, amusingly, means it can launch a DDoS attack simply by tweeting the web address of its next target and waiting for the tsunami of clicks to have the desired effect.

Given the group's modus operandi – boasting on social networks, sticking it to the man – it was entirely unshocking when, on Tuesday morning, the police arrested their first suspect: a teenager who, according to his mum, suffers from agoraphobia and "lives his life online". Ryan Cleary may, of course, be found completely innocent but when the group's leaders are rounded up it's a fairly safe bet that none of them will turn out to be attractive, outgoing 30-year-old women.

It was ever thus, of course: awkward teenagers entering adulthood, convinced that they know better than the stupid old grownups who control their world. In previous generations those kids would organise protest marches or start angry magazines or accidentally blow themselves up trying to make a pipe-bomb from The Anarchist Cookbook. Only a very tiny number, though, had the resources or the opportunity to even slightly inconvenience The Man. Today, however, the internet has lowered the barriers to everything: international protests can be co-ordinated through Facebook groups, blogs have removed the printing and distribution barriers from publishing, and a growing suite of online hacking tools have made it possible for a 19-year-old kid to embarrass the CIA.

Unfortunately the video game-like simplicity with which even serious crimes can be committed online makes it easy to underestimate their real world consequences. Earlier this week, the Obama administration proposed new anti-hacking laws which would provide 20-year prison terms for hackers who "endanger national security" – and, under the Extradition Act, British hackers should be in no doubt that the government will gift-wrap them and deliver them to Washington.

For that reason, the members of LulzSec are either modern-day versions of Arsène Lupin, Maurice Leblanc's fearless gentleman thief for whom the risk of capture was part of the thrill, or they're absolute, grade A imbeciles (spoiler alert: it's the second one). We've all seen enough movies – which is to say, the first 10 minutes of Sneakers – to know what happens when you mess with the UK government. Any day now, in Wales or Warsaw or Wasilla, a spotty kid in a V for Vendetta T-shirt will be dragged from his parents' house at gunpoint and bundled – sobbing and pleading that it was all a joke – into the back of a van.

The CIA: doing it for the lulz since 1947.

• This article was amended at 12:07 on 22 June after complaints about the language used