Ranking Motives

Felipe Gonzalez

June 21, 2025

Personally I don’t really find it to be a least or more important motive, they all in their

own unique way, affected individuals and some with a more serious irreversible

damage that cannot be undone or recovered from. I rank the motives based on my

personal opinion on what is more common and severe.

1- Money: Money moves the world, everything moves around with money, it just makes

the most sense. You hear about the hacks to banks, fraud in the elderly population,

most systems manage capital, so there is a large gain if they do it right. Look at the

ransomware in Vegas, the casino paid it off so they could continue with daily operations.

2- Revenge: My belief is that this can be one of the more serious ones, because it can

become personal, bad breakups lead to very bad consequences where people actually

get hurt. Like with the article, just because it is digital, the damage can be

psychological, victim shaming where violence can be implicit to the crime. We have

seen on the news, Netflixs shows on how this has become a trend of people seeking or

trying to profit with this tactics, most of teh time teh victim commits suicide because of

the embarrasment and shame that could not be taken away, is in the NET forever.

3- Politics: Individuals within any form of government can become victims, or

whistleblowers. Depending on the individual capabilities and security clearance, can

have access to very sensitive data that can be a valuable asset to any foreign political

party. Personnel can leak, attack or sell information to another source for its political

advantage within our own systems.

4- Recognition: Individuals want credit for the things they do, they take pride and you

can see it with the names they give themselves. Can be individuals, or have become

groups, and they are not shy attaching their name to their crime, they like to brag. They

want to be the first to do super hacks, others are trying to compete. Some just do the

cybercrime just so say that it’s possible, like they are looking for challenges to beat.

5- Multiple Reasons: There are many cyber attacks that are based on multiple reasons,

can have a political agenda, financial retribution over revenge. Psychologically it can be

a number of things that can activate an individual to commit a number of crimes, can be

someone’s ego that got hurt, someone that feels betrayed by their country, someone

that got fired because of a failed system. There are just too many unknowns and that iswhat makes this field so interesting. One might just seek a moment of pride by seeking

systems to attack, that big company professionals have built.

6- Entertainment: This might be back to back with boredom. I can see this as an

influence for someone to commit crimes, the necessity to be seen by an audience is

something they feed on, and we fuel it many times because accepting and advertising

their crimes. Is like an influencer making videos disrespecting cultures or assaulting

people, what do we do, we like, share or post in our own threads for more people to

see.

7- Boredom: This might be the most dangerous one of all. An Individual with no sense

purpose, or gain, one that can do any damage he wants because he is bored looking for

excitement, challenges to himself or just trying to fit in somewhere. One thing that we

can agree on is that they are passionate about what they do, they are good with

technology skills and self driven.