Psychological Approaches

In Cyber-Crime there is still a need for theories that deal specifically with hacking behaviors. The reason may lay in the fact that hacking is a relatively new phenomenon, by the fact that is a unique criminal activity that does’t follows the norm of criminology or because it involve a heterogeneous population that hack for different motives. Although the major theory of criminality fall short of complete explanation of every hacking behavior, some of them are useful to explain certain population and the psychology behind cyber-crime.

Psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory analyses the pathological process of the person in order to explain the criminal behavior. In Freud's theory,  the superego is responsible for the inner moral conduct and its development is correlated to a satisfactory parent-child relationship. If this development doesn't progress accordingly with the different developmental phases, the superego will be inadequate and that can account for the criminal behavior.

Aichhorn is one of the first psychoanalyst to attempt at understanding criminal behavior and he believes that the child that has an asocial perception trough his/her experience with the primary carer will have an underlying predisposition “latent delinquency”, that might resulted a criminal behavior.