Individual motives for cybercrimes ranked most likely to least likely, from 1 to 7:

1. Multiple Reasons – In the field of criminology, there is never a single reason for someone to commit a crime. Humans are way too complex and multi-dimensional to only have one reason to do any behavior, let alone a crime. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs model shows this, as it states that we have five types of needs, or motives that drive us to do things. We have multiple reasons for doing something because its essential to our survival that we cover as many of our needs as we can.
   
2. Boredom – I believe cybercrime mostly stems from this emotion. Boredom is an emotion that drives all of us to do activities that make us feel less bored. I got into my hobbies, like programming, because of boredom. For others, boredom caused them to commit cybercrimes, which is not something that anyone can easily do. It requires them to learn a lot of difficult, dry, and inaccessible technical knowledge. So for something to want to learn something like this, they probably were really bored.
   
3. Entertainment – This motive is a subset of the boredom motive because we engage in entertainment to avoid the boredom in our lives.
   
4. Money – Money is something we all need to survive and to buy the things that we want. So it makes sense why it would be a motive for hackers. While most people and my classmates would say money would be the number one motive for hackers, I don’t fully agree. I might be wrong about this, but I believe that Cybercriminals know that hacking is an unstable way to make money, since there is always a risk of getting caught. With the skills that they have, they know it’s much easier and safer to attain money through a tech job, maybe in the cybersecurity field, but of course, they’ll still do hacking on the side. So since they could easily attain money from a normal job, I don’t believe it would be the highest motivator. I placed this motive and the ones above it at the top of this list because they are all common to the human experience. Not everyone is motivated by the bottom three.
   
5. Political – This kind of motive is held by those who have strong political beliefs, and want to enforce those beliefs through cybercrimes. I placed this lower in the list since not everyone has a strong belief in an ideology. Politically-driven cybercrimes usually occur in international conflicts between opposing countries. For instance, countries like Russia and China are constantly committing cybercrimes on American systems. This motive is also held by individuals who are dissatisfied with the state of their country.
   
6. Revenge – I believe this isn’t a common motive for cybercrime simply because of the fact that it is personal; There’s a risk of the hacker exposing their identity by retaliating, and of course the risk of the victim retaliating. If the victim remembers the person that they slighted in the past and the details of the attack, then the victim may know who attacked them and why. Then the victim may expose the hacker’s identity to the law enforcement, or inflict cybercrimes back onto the hacker.
   
7. Recognition – Although there have been some notable cases of recognition being a motive, this is probably the rarest motive because it is the riskiest. By doing cybercrimes out of recognition, the hacker is putting a target on their back, causing law enforcement to focus on catching them. Hackers must be hidden to get away with a cybercrime, and by trying to gain recognition, they are doing the opposite.