Q: Review the articles linked with each individual motive.  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.

Answer: According to the 7 motives of individual motive, here is my ranking for what a cybercriminal is most likely to be motivated for:

1. Multiple reasons
2. Political
3. For money
4. Recognition
5. Revenge
6. Entertainment
7. Boredom

From the 7 motives from this list, Boredom seems the least likely motivation for someone to get into cybercrime; simply put, the commitment and risk to taking it seems like too much for anyone to reasonably learn or act out cybercrimes. Entertainment is close behind boredom for more or less the same reasoning behind boredom, but it makes a bit more sense because some cybercriminals can more easily justify the crime because of a lack of perspective on the actual damage that it can inflict on a person/organization. Afterall, some people can justify that because the act is all digital and doesn’t cause real danger to any person physically, then the act isn’t dangerous or illegal. Another motivation could be revenge, either for the case of commonly cyberbullying and revenge porn. While this is a very common motivation for committing cybercrime, especially when people feel justified because they were hurt for one reason or another, there’s considerations on the long-term effect of the victim and the actual gain for the perpetrator, so it doesn’t seem as likely as the higher up motivations. Recognition feels like more of a reason why someone would want to commit a cybercrime, either just to make some kind of statement, to get back againt someone who hurt them, or in general just to be recognized for their actions; while this is a big motivation and definetely more likely then the prior three, I don’t think it’s as crazy when considering the next few. Both for monetary gain and to create a political message, especially in these times, are some of the biggest motivators not just for smaller hackers/hacker groups but on the larger scale for countries as well, as there’s loads of money-making potential from scamming people and companies, and in addition some of the biggest cyber attacks ever like NotPetya or the Olympic Destroyer malware were influenced due to political reasons (both instances were russian-based attacks because of poor relations with other countries like Ukraine). Ultimately however, the biggest motivation for why cybercrime is committed is a combination of any of the prior motivations. Afterall, political cyberattacks also have some motivations in revenge/entertainment and a lot of revenge cyberattacks could also have influence with wanting to be recognized as well. In reality, there’s never only one reason why cybercriminals would be motivated to commit a cybercrime, and instead there’s multiple for why cybercriminals would go to such lengths to do what they do.