Motivation of the Hacker

All hackers are not the same though they might be all have a  common motivation to maintain their invisibility. Many hackers are not malicious, they hack for the thrill of it, to learn or simply to “look inside” some info. Others gather information for profit or intelligence, to corrupt data or even to see what kind of damage they are able to do.

Money
67% of hackers get into cyber crime for monetary gain (Symantec Corporation, 2012). Whether it’s electronic funds transfer (credit card & ATM scams); data, services and capacity theft (communications or data storage), intellectual property theft, extortion, telephone services unauthorized usage, fraud and marketing schemes (client lists, email lists, free, linked and subscription site payments), money is the primary motivation behind cyber-crime.

Albert Gonzalez (aka SoupNazi) was the mind behind the biggest fraud in history; Gonzalez was sentenced in March 2010 to 20 years in prison, a record sentence for hacking. Gonzalez pleaded guilty to charges of hacking into computers of several companies in order to steal information and the reselling of more than 170 million credit cards and ATM numbers from 2005 throughout 2007.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?pagewanted=all

Vladimir Levin, a biochemistry graduate of St. Petersburg's University in mathematics, was the mastermind behind the first publicly revealed international bank robbery over a network. Levin access the Citibank network to obtain a list of customer codes and passwords to then transfer $3.7 million through wire to accounts his group controlled in the United States, Finland,the Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail, and ordered to pay Citibank $240,015.

Ego: intellectual challenge
The hacker with this motivation is disinterested to outside recognition, their trigger to hack lies in the challenge to hack in a secure or high profile sites. This category includes those who hack to meet an intellectual challenge. This seems to be the motivation for the hackers who write viruses, that often are the problem per se but they open back doors for malicious attack for spammers or other types of infiltration to the system.

Entertainment and curiosity
In this category are those who hack for personal pleasure. This form of diversion may often be an offshoot of involvement in gaming and code writing. Seemly the Morris Worm (1988) by Robert Tappan Morris (aka rtm) was just was intended to be harmless and Morris make a “mistake” in writing it (Grabosky and Smith 1998) In just a few days, the Morris worm traveled across Arpanet and infected more than 6000 PC at universities, research centers and military installations for an estimated $10 million was lost due to lack of access to the Arpanet. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/rtm/

Hacktivism
Hacktivism and cause driven hacks are other motivations behind hack-attacks. There have been an increasing number of attacks due to the expansion of Internet, however this kind of cyber-crime is one of the most difficult to predict due to the nature of the ideology behind them. As other forms of terrorism Hacktivism would act as consequences of a particular believe system in order to influence policy or action made from the “status quo”.

Anonymous, “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us”. In April 2012 Time magazine named Anonymous as one of the most influential groups in the world. It as founded in 2003 as an on-line/of-line community opposed to Internet censorship. In 2008 Anonymous become more political and after the campaign anti digital piracy they have been called the digital Robin Hood and the “anarchic cyber-guerrillas”. Anonymus doesn’t have a defined identity on-line either, many website are strongly associated with Anonymus such as anonnews, whyweprotest  but they don't have an official one.

Cult of the Dead Cow, also known as cDc or cDc Communications , is an organization founded in Texas in 1984. cDc host a weblog that the members use to release news, thoughts and opinions of the members. The cDc goal is "Global Domination Through Media Saturation," and among other things they are proud of taking responsibility for disrupted communications by moving satellites, to be in Cybe-war with of Scientology, to give Ronald Reagan Alzheimer's disease; to be mentioned by Slobodan Milosevic, who referred to them while cross-examining a witness during his War Crimes Tribunal and to be the modern incarnation of an ancient gnostic order that dates back to the cult of Hathor (the cow goddess) in ancient Egypt (http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/about.html).

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is one of the biggest hacker organizations in the world, it is based in Germany and in their home page they state that “For more than thirty years we are providing information about technical and societal issues, such as surveillance, privacy, freedom of information, hacktivism, data security and many other interesting things around technology and hacking issues”. As a hacker community they strive for more transparency in government, human right and universal access to technology (http://www.ccc.de/en/).

1984 Network Liberty Alliance its a group of software programmers, artists, social activists and general public formed in 1984 that are mostly interested in Nuclear Disarmament

Gary McKinnon (Solo)
Gary McKinnon is one of most notorious figures in political/freedom hacking. In 2002 he was arrested and accused to have hacked 97 US Military computer between February 2001 and March 2002. The sentence for such crime would have been six months sentence served in UK but US government requested an extradition and 70 years in jail. The Us have claimed that Gary McKinnon deleted critical files from the operating system of the United States Army’s Military District of Washington, weapons logs at the Earle Naval Weapons Station and coping data, account files and passwords  from US authorities. McKinnon denied any attack on US computer systems however he admitted in many public statements that he obtained unauthorised access to computer systems in the United States. He claims his motivation, was to find evidence of UFOs and suppression of free energy.



