To be honest, I learn't most of my "skills" doing similar. Producing home-made wall hacks, writing custom application wrappers to protect my work and so on. All of this during my earlier years, 13-18yrs. I got myself into some pretty serious trouble and was reined in by the parents once they realised the depths I was getting to. The issue is most parents and children see anything on computers as "Virtual", and don't realise what the are doing has real life implications. I was one of those, and I consider myself pretty intelligent. It's easy to do.