Psychological Factors That Motivatehackers

¶ … Psychological Factors Motivating Hackers

Recent advances in IT (Information Technology) has revolutionized the business model where different organizations have launched online businesses to achieve global competitive market advantages. Despite the benefits that businesses derive from the new business model, hackers have taken the advantages of changes in the business landscape to penetrate into the database of different organizations and steal sensitive information. Many companies have lost an enormous amount of money from these events. Some hackers have gone to the extent of defacing the websites of legitimate business organizations. While some hackers are motivated by financial gains, some hackers are politically motivated. However, some hackers are motivated to enhance their social status in the hacking community.

Investigating the psychological factor that motivates hackers is the best strategy to understand motives behind the hacking. Woo, (2003) argue personal and financial benefits are the major factors that make hackers indulging in hacking activities. In the United States, many companies have been subject to hacking attacks where hackers stole millions of credit cards and later sell them in the black markets. For example, some hackers busted into the database of the Target Company in 2013 and stole over 40 million credit card information, 70 million email addresses, and other contact information. Along this event, hackers also busted into the database of Home Depot database and cast away the credit card information of 56 million shoppers. (Hawkins, 2015). These events show that personal and financial benefits are the major factors that make hackers indulge in hacking activities. Despite the lesson learned from the hacking event of the Target Companies, hackers still busted into the websites of many companies that accept credit cards in 2014 and stole millions of credit cards in 2014.

The second major factor that motivates hacker is that some people like to prove their hacking skills to enhance their status in the hacking community. This motivation is particularly rampant among novice hackers, street kiddies, or inexperienced hackers. In this scenario, these group of hackers will not attempt to tamper with the websites integrated with high-level security. These hackers will only like to boost their ego attacking companies with trivial security procedures. The motivation has made many businesses with no sensitive information to be stolen to be a victim of hacking. This issue is particular common nowadays where hackers have defaced the websites of non-trivial businesses to demonstrate the ego and hacking skills.

Politically motivated hackers are springing up within the last few years where some state and non-state actors are sponsoring hackers to satisfy their political goals. Some countries such as North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia are the example of state-sponsored hackers. For example, China is currently sponsoring some hackers for the economic gains stealing the intellectual properties of some U.S. companies, makes the copies of their products and later to be sold at cheaper prices. However, Russia, North Korea, and Iranian hackers are politically motivated. Most of these hackers target the database of the U.S. government agencies to steal their military and security intelligence. In 2013, there were approximately 61,000 cyber-attacks on federal agencies across the United States. Moreover, Nork Korea deliberately attacked the Sony picture and unleashed much embarrassing information to the public to damage the market superiority of the company. Political motivated non-state actors such as terrorists and some group of organizations are implementing their hacking skills to unleash their political goals. The best strategy that organizations can employ to identify hackers is to install a powerful (intrusion detection system) to detect any potential hacking activities in their systems before hackers carry out a comprehensive attack. Moreover, the organizations should carry out a comprehensive research to identify hackers profile and their IP address. Organizations should also install the stronger servers with the encryption systems. They should also install strong filtering rules, a powerful firewall, close open ports, and patch the systems.

Topic 2

An ethical hacker is a networking and computer expert hired by a legitimate organization to penetrate into their computer to test their systems to identify the vulnerability in the systems. The ethical hackers test the information systems of the organization on behalf of the owner to identify the vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could have exploited. The goal of ethical hackers is to evaluate the information system of the organization and provides professional advice revealing the strategy that can be employed to protect their information systems. On the other hand, non-ethical hackers are the mischievous individuals breaking into the system of an organization or individuals with the intent to steal information such as credit cards or money and sometimes cause damage by inserting malware into the systems. While an ethical hacker is permitted by law because it is a mutual arrangement between the owner of the business and the ethical hackers, contrarily, the non-ethical hacker's activity is against the law, and the intention of this category of hackers are to cause a damage to the organizational information systems. While the ethical hackers are security professionals often aged between 25 and 50. However, the non-ethical hackers are aged between 15 and 35 years. Although, some state-sponsored hackers may be older than 35 years, moreover, most of the ethical hackers are the American or Indian professionals. However, non-ethical hackers may come from any background, and largest percentage non-ethical hackers are from China and Russia.

The factors that motivate the ethical hackers is to improve the security of the information systems. Upon discovering the security flaws in the system, they do not exploit the loopholes, rather, they report the loopholes to system owners for remedies. Thus, ethical hackers sometimes called white hackers to evaluate the security system of an organization with an attempt to detect vulnerabilities, and provide advice to the system owners the strategy they should carry out to secure their systems.

Topic 3

The hacking addiction is a compulsive or excessive indulging in hacking despite its negative consequence. This category of people may not interested in outside world, their main preoccupation is to inflict damage to the organizational network system. Nykodym, Ariss, & Kurtz (2008) argue that there is a relationship between cyber addition and cybercrime. Many addicted hackers are often unable to indulge in social interaction, their main preoccupation is to inflict damages to the system of other organizations and other individuals. Although, some hackers may be motivated for the financial gain or be politically motivated; however, these groups may be still addicted to hacking because some of these hackers possess necessary skills to earn a good living without indulging in hacking. Nevertheless, they still prefer to break into the systems and try to get away with costly and sensitive information to boost their egos. (Campbell, & and Kennedy 2014).

However, some hackers are not driven by political and economic gains; these groups are a disproportionate number of younger individuals indulging in these type of events. For example, large percentages of street kiddies have a problem of Internet Addiction Disorder akin to narcotic dependence and alcoholism. The best strategy to address this problem is to provide a comprehensive program to make them recover from addiction. For example, family therapy, use of support group, and limit of internet use to the younger generation can assist in limiting their addition. Moreover, the government should put street kiddies who inflict damages to other people information systems into the juvenile houses and use the appropriate therapeutic approach to correct their addictive behaviors.