Entertainment – 5
Political – 3
Revenge – 6
Boredom – 7
Recognition – 4
For Money – 1
Multiple Reasons – 2
After reading each article based on its respective motivation, I have ranked the motives from most sense to least sense as follows: Money, Multiple Reasons, Political, Recognition, Entertainment, Revenge, and Boredom. The reason I placed them in this order is that through reading all the articles, most mentioned at some point there was financial motivation in what they were doing either as a primary cause or secondary one.
Multiple Reasons was ranked second because it had various reasons behind someone’s motivation, which makes sense. Everyone is different and has different personalities, so you would expect motivations to differ as well.
Political motivation is ranked third primarily because most of the hacktivist, leaktivist or public disclosure organizations seem to be involved in exposing injustices that the government is incapable of or unwilling to pursue. It was mentioned in the article that, the hacktivists exposed the locations of videos of people involved in the January 6th attacks that they posted on Parler for the public to be made aware of. The government will frown on the method of obtaining the videos, but that will not stop them from using the videos against the individuals in them.
Recognition is ranked fourth because I believe that cybercriminals do not necessarily hack for recognition attempting not to get caught, but they also do not want someone else taking credit for their work, which involves some revealing to someone.
Entertainment is fifth because even in this article, the hacker mentioned of the operation being very complex and taking a couple of months to carry out. The risks of getting caught and facing consequences does not seem to outweigh the reward. The hacker eventually did allude to him attempting to sell the information retrieved to the highest bidder.
The sixth motive I ranked was revenge. Revenge on someone through cyberbullying and revenge porn is never a good reason to pursue hacking. No matter how much you dislike someone, those moments were for private consumption and should remain that way.
I picked Boredom as my seventh motive, similarly to entertainment, the risks of getting caught do not outweigh the reward, and in the case of the article regarding child grooming, cyberbullying, and child pornography, there is no reward at all in partaking in that activity.