- Multiple Reasons
- I think a majority of cybercrime, especially larger scale cybercrime, is motivated by a range of factors including politics, money and revenge rather than any singular factor.
- Political
- When it comes to a majority of white-collar crimes political allegiances play a massive role. Watergate-like controversies are seen more in the news than ever before. As more organizations move to fully electronic systems there is a linear growth in espionage and exploitive crimes related to political activities.
- Money
- Outside of family, money is probably the largest motivator for most of life’s actions. While I think that politics play a slightly larger role in cybercrime, money is a huge motivating factor. In the article about the person who scraped 700M LinkedIn profiles because he was bored was still selling all of the profiles. Money was still a huge factor.
- Revenge
- Revenge and crime are also closely related. Revenge porn is a giant issue that often goes unpunished. Revenge is also a massive motivator in a majority of violent crimes such as murder and assault. I have it listed lower than Money and Politics because I think most cyber crime is less revenge based than political or monetary.
- Entertainment/Boredom
- I think entertainment and boredom are kind of intertwined. The rise of crimes being committed by “script kiddies” and people who learned these skills off YouTube in their personal time is on the rise.
- Recognition
- You see a lot of the news about companies or corporations that are hit big by cybercrime where the perpetrators are anonymous (not the hacktivist group). This leads me to believe that a lot of cyber-criminals are not looking for notoriety.