Cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken thinks we need to understand cybercriminal motivations, while mentoring young people with tech and hacking skills

“A humanistic, cognitive psychology approach to hacking would be to consider an emotion such as revenge… But my favourite explanation for the academic literature is a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to hacking, which actually conceptualises hacking in Freudian terms as a cyber-sexual urge to penetrate. And there are castration complex overtones in terms of being cut off from the network as well…”

Mary Aiken knows what she’s talking about: she’s the cyberpsychology expert whose work was the inspiration for TV show CSI: Cyber.

Her joke about Freud and hacking in a speech at the Web Summit conference – poking fun more at behavioural psychologists’ attempts to understand hackers than at hackers themselves – was followed by a more serious look at the motivation of cybercriminals behind the attacks on companies like Sony and TalkTalk.

“As a cyberpsychologist, I’m always asked what is the motive to engage in hacking? The point is that hacking is a skillset,” said Aiken. “It’s somehow become a pejorative and negative term, but back in the 50s when it was first used, and even through the 70s, it was considered as a spectacular skillset.”

That has fuelled Aiken’s belief that as a society we are “sleepwalking” into the future. She talked about the practice of RAT – routine activity theory – which studies crimes clustered around particular areas, and how they relate to the habits of the offender.

“We look at the offender, where they live, where they work and where they play, and effectively this is geographic profiling in a real-world context,” she said.

“The victims will lie along those pathways between live, work and play, and you’ll see a buffer zone around where they work, live or play which is really a self-protection mechanism for the offender.”

Aiken, in her role as director of the Director of the RCSI CyberPsychology Research Centre is working on applying this theory to the online world too.

“If we think about the web as an environment – surface web, deep web – and think about offenders and organised cybercriminals. Where do they work, where do they live, and where do they play?” she said.

“We know a lot about real-world criminology. We know about a kid in a particular home in a particular neighbourhood with a particular group of friends that may get sucked into juvenile delinquency. We don’t know anything about cyber juvenile delinquency.”

Aiken cited the recent hack of TalkTalk, and the subsequent arrest of a 15 year-old in connection with it, as an important moment to talk about approaches towards cybercrime.

“What we have to question ourselves is, as a society, do we really want to criminalise 13, 14 and 15 year-olds? Or do we want to understand their behaviour, engage with their incredible skillsets, mentor them and try to point them in the right direction?” she said.

“We have scales for IQ, CQ and EQ [intelligence, emotion and cultural intelligence] but we don’t have any scales for TQ – technology quotient. We need to measure those superb skillsets, and mentor and develop them.”

Aiken said that the future may sometimes feel strange for the parents of those teenagers, however.

“If we think that our kids are overly immersed in cyber entities at the moment, in terms of turning up at the dinner table with their mobile phone in their hand, wait until you see the next generation when the kids will turn up with full helmets on,” she said.

“We have to figure out as humans how we’re going to engage with all things cyber going forward.”