Article Review 2: Understanding the Connection Between Hackers and Their Hacks:
Analyzing USDOJ Reports for Hacker Profiles
This study’s research question aims to investigate whether a connection exists between
the age, gender, and nationality of hackers and the attributes of the hacks they carry out. To
achieve this, the research examines press reports from the United States Department of Justice
(USDOJ) spanning from January 2019 to December 2021.

Principles of Social Science

The introduction of this article explains the types of drivers which leads people to
hacking parsimoniously. Hackers originally were people who were rather liberal, were pushed
by the value of freedom, and were believing that information should be shared rather than kept
secret. But as technology advanced hacking became more lucrative and became a viable way to
make a living albeit illegal in some rights (which leads into the division of white and black hat
hackers). The fact that they are trying to find patterns in age, gender, and nationality gives a
deterministic kind of approach to looking at why people hack and what lead them to this life.
Looking at it through a lens of objectivity, it is easy to see how nationality can be a factor since
there are larger concentrations of hackers in some nations than others and what lead them to hack
could have been a result of high levels of poverty in some countries which lead them to hacking
as a ways to make ends meet or escape poverty.

Research Methods and Data Analysis
The type of research method used in this study was the review of over 50 USDOJ
cybercrime reports to extract data on age, gender, and nationality. The study makes use of data science and analysis by using tables of data broken up into different variables such as did the
criminals act alone or with others. The study showed that around 90% of them were males and
70% worked in groups of 2 or more as opposed to working individually. The bulk of offenders
are between the ages of 18 and 47 then there is a steep drop off in their numbers. Also, there was
no large difference between domestic and international cybercriminals, they come from
everywhere.

Challenges of Marginalized Groups
This study can give some light on to how marginalized groups are pushed to criminal
activity in some way. Many of these criminals did not have many privileges that others do and
could have been born into poverty. Hacking can be seen as a quick way out of poverty in
exchange for committing criminal acts on the internet. This is why it is important to extend
education equally to all social classes so that these people in poverty can see ethically positive
ways of making money like white hat hacking and such.

Conclusion
This study does make helpful contributions to society. One contribution is that the study
sheds light on the disparity in gender of hackers, which also translates to the IT field in the
corporate world as well as it shows not as many women are pursuing this profession legally or
illegally. Another contribution to society lies in the overall objective of this study which is, “to
provide law enforcement with tools to profile hackers,”, the study definitely accomplished that
with their tables of data to explore who is committing these crimes.