Some common motivating factors, are
- Money: This includes anyone who makes a financial profit from the crime, whether it’s a bank employee who uses his computer access to divert funds from someone else’s account to his own, an outsider who hacks into a company database to steal identities that he can sell to other criminals, or a professional “hacker for hire” who’s paid by one company to steal the trade secrets of another. Almost anyone can be motivated by money – the young, old, male, female, those from all socio-economic classes – so in order to have meaningful data, we have to break this category down further. The white collar criminal tends to be very different from the seasoned scam artist or the professional “digital hit man.”
- Emotion: The most destructive cybercriminals often act out of emotion, whether anger/rage, revenge, “love” or despair. This category includes spurned lovers or spouses/ex-spouses (cyber-stalking, terroristic threats, email harassment, unauthorized access), disgruntled or fired employees (defacement of company web sites, denial of service attacks, stealing or destroying company data, exposure of confidential company information), dissatisfied customers, feuding neighbors, students angry about a bad grade, and so forth. This can even be someone who gets mad over a heated discussion on a web board or in a social networking group.
- Sexual impulses: Although related to emotion, this category is slightly different and includes some of the most violent of cybercriminals: serial rapists, sexual sadists (even serial killers) and pedophiles. Child pornographers can fit into this category or they may be merely exploiting the sexual impulses of others for profit, in which case they belong in the “money” category.
- Politics/religion: Closely related to the “emotions” category because people get very emotional about their political and religious beliefs and are willing to commit heinous crimes in the name of those beliefs. This is the most commonly motivator for cyberterrorists, but also motivates many lesser crimes, as well.
- “Just for fun”: This motivation applies to teenagers (or even younger) and others who may hack into networks, share copyrighted music/movies, deface web sites and so forth – not out of malicious intent or any financial benefit, but simply “because they can.” They may do it to prove their skills to their peers or to themselves, they may simply be curious, or they may see it as a game. Although they don’t intentionally do harm, their actions can cost companies money, cause individuals grief and tie up valuable law enforcement resources.