What is so surprising about that? Societies operate largely on trust. Once you throw that out of the window you can do all kinds of things but you will mostly likely end up being found out and ostracized or jailed.

Just like any idiot with a kitchen knife can walk into a shopping mall and kill people hacking email accounts and servers is quite doable. The only reason it keeps on happening is because it is hard to catch the perpetrators.

Sorry, your point may be valid but I don't see how it relates to my comment.

The point is that any teenager can likely get into your house, burglarize you or murder you.

You could go and live in a vault, but that would take the fun out of living and so as a society we have dealt with this by making this illegal and the chances of getting caught are large enough that people tend to not do those things.

But if the chances of getting caught were near zero you might have to go and live in a vault.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about how teenagers can build systems resilient against these attacks, not that they carry out the attacks themselves. (Although I conjecture that a significant proportion of these attacks are also carried out by teenagers.)

It goes both ways doesn't it? Whether teenagers can set up a system more resilient than your average systems administrator is something that I doubt anyway. Most teenagers could not hack their way out of a wet paper bag, but then there are some that totally blow your mind. Just like with older folks. Age does not have much to do with it.

If you are the target of a foreign intelligence service, you are going to be hacked, end of story. There is very little you can do to protect yourself from a threat like that over time.

Sure, but if I'm a major candidate in a national election, perhaps I should be protected by my domestic intelligence service. This is what I don't understand: why aren't we playing defense? Why isn't it a huge embarrassment to the Secret Service (in the US) or another defense agency when a campaign under their protection is successfully attacked like this? I would love to see the Russia investigations in the US Congress add a focus on bolstering defenses, rather than just doling out blame. The same should go for France and elsewhere. Cyber-defense is an arms race, but it's a battle that can and should be fought. Surely this is something all parties can agree on!

If you look into most high-profile hacks, you see that their opsec and security practices were weak.

You don't see Amazon or Stripe being hacked all the time, and they are certainly large enough targets.

Something setup at home would likely have a much smaller attack surface. Apples and oranges.

I didn't mean to imply that the system itself would be setup at home.

My point is that loads of kids have the knowledge and common sense to create something that would be more secure against attacks than many professional, corporate or political systems.