Unthinkable - One in five students hackers rather than slackers

The survey was conducted on 1,000 students with 37% admitting to hacking Facebook profiles, 26% email accounts and a worrying 10% have hacked shopping accounts. One in three said they hacked for fun, one in five out of curiosity and one in seven for money.

The recent Twitter attack, which although essentially harmless was quite annoying for tweeters, is a good example of what 20% of students are getting up to in their spare time. According to a new statistic one in five students have hacked at some point in their lives ranging from the harmless (well relatively) hilarity of hacking a Facebook profile to more serious offences such as email and online shopping accounts.

The age of the students ranged from 18-21, 32% of them said they thought it was cool and 28% said they found it easy.

Rumplestiltskin - a folk tale still as relevant today as it was back then: don't go singing your password while dancing around a campfire

It's not hard to see the temptation the socially maladjusted must feel, controlling the lives of the people (aka their room mates) with poor choices of passwords from the comfort of their own rooms and fulfilling their own need for self-importance, but there are some serious ramifications to hacking. Not only is it extremely annoying for the people who get hacked but it's also illegal.

"We live in a world where social networking, email and the internet is embedded into our every day lives from a far younger age, so early education is essential to ensure young people know the devastating consequences this activity can have” said constable Stuart Hyde, specialist in e-crime prevention "hacking is illegal and we need to ensure everyone understands that."

Of course a slap on the wrist and a wagged finger isn't going to stop a hacker but they can be prevented by original and more complex passwords. A strong password will have a mix of upper and lowercase letters, as well as numbers to make it harder to hack.

You've got to admit it does look cool in NCIS when McGee and Abby are hacking into the FBI or some such fictional hijinx, though of course that's a bit different than guessing your drunken room mate's password (here's a clue, it's beer1) while they're slumped over a desk.