- The motive that makes the most sense to me is committing a crime for money, because of how desperate a person can become if they don’t feel like earning money in an ethical and legal way. This is because they’re often able to earn money easily if they’re skilled at manipulating their victims to get what they want from them.
- Political motivations would be the second motive in my opinion. Although I disagree with people who do it for this reason, I can still imagine why they would do it for this reason, if it means that the offender can manipulate a system to spread their political ideas on a wider scale.
- Doing unlawful acts for entertainment would be the third motive to me. If someone turns out to be fascinated by using computers to gain access to personal data, company data, etc., in addition to capabilities that were intended to be reserved for administrators, then they might want to find out what else they’re capable of doing. At this point, a person who finds joy and satisfaction in this might become interested in committing a cybercrime because it feels like a game, or a challenge to complete.
- Boredom especially makes sense to me when offenders are targeting children especially. Many offenders are willing to take advantage of people who are using a device without any filtering software. They also know that people who are online and bored will likely do a lot in order to feel some sense of entertainment or satisfaction, which is the offender’s strategy in targeting people who are perhaps feeling unhappy or unfulfilled in the moment.
- Revenge is unfortunate because of how someone would go to great lengths just to harm someone to make themselves feel better about whatever wrong thing that someone else did to them in the past. Unfortunately, I can imagine this happening in a couple of different ways. The offender could be someone who is (or was) close with their victim(s). Or the offender could even be someone who wants to attack innocent people online, especially if their victims have any connection to someone else who said or did something to negatively affect the offender in the past.
- Recognition doesn’t make that much sense to me in this context, because I feel like the people who do criminal activity online for this reason aren’t considering what others will actually think of them for doing it. In reality, many people will frown upon an individual who does something as sophisticated as a cyber-attack just to “impress” people by their technical capabilities.
- The last motive for me would be multiple reasons. I would think that most cyber-criminals would have a single motive that makes them decide to work towards successfully carrying out their attack. However, I’m confident there’s sadly some people who do it for more than just one reason. For example, perhaps an offender could choose to do the attack because they want to get revenge while also earning money illegally.