Review the articles linked with each individual motive in the presentation page or Slide #4.  Rank the motives from 1 to 7 as the motives that you think make the most sense (being 1) to the least sense (being 7).  Explain why you rank each motive the way you rank it.

  • 1-Multiple Reasons: This motive makes the most sense to me because it’s essentially an amalgamation of all the below motives. If there’s one compelling reason for somebody to perform any action, you can usually dig to find at least one more. People who perform cybercrimes for money probably target companies or people that they prior grudges against. The neutralization theory mentions this.
  • 2-Money-ORM. Operational Risk Management. There is always a risk vs. reward assessment that people do. Whether they realize it or not, people are weighing their options and if people weren’t willing to pay others to perform cybercrimes, then i truly believe that a large portion of crimes just wouldn’t happen. There wouldn’t be a reward for them. Only consequence.
  • 3-Political-While I am not entirely in the loop on what is going on around the world, I’m not an idiot and I do understand that countries are constantly spying on each other. Any and every country with the ability to do so, is. This motive is a very close second for this reason. Somebody performing cybercrimes for their country probably no consequences to their actions and only reward. If they do the things that are asked of them, then they can get recognized or paid.
  • 4-Revenge-Going back to the point made in the 2nd ranked motive, people are more likely to commit crimes against a person who they believe have wronged them. This isn’t always the case, but it wouldn’t be hard for someone to rationalize their actions if they believe that they’re in the right.
  • 5-Recognition-I think the article for recognition summarizes this up very nicely. Especially the very last sentence of the article. The offender was sentenced to 8 months in prison for committing crimes and while he was being sentenced for attacking a campaign website, he was using social media to make it seem like he was hacking someone’s account and harassing them. At the end of the article, because of his escapades, he was hired as a web designer. I’m not sure if that was his intention, to earn recognition to get a job, however because of the news publicizing his actions he now has a good paying job.
  • 5-Entertainment-This motive doesn’t make too much sense to me because using the risk vs. reward system, there really is no reward other than staving off the ever-looming boredom. Which if you grew with a relatively poor-quality childhood or are just predisposed based on your personality to being a bad person, then this motive makes sense. Otherwise, I do not understand how someone could get their kicks by hacking someone’s account. Again, they must have some sort of grudge against the person that they choose.
  • 6-Boredom-I put this motive last, because it is very similar to the entertainment motive and again, I just do not understand why someone would choose this as activity as their method of “killing time”.