Bharat Bhise HNA is a cybersecurity specialist who knows just about everything that there is to know about this industry. I had the great pleasure of catching up with Bharat last week to discuss a range of topics within cybersecurity and something which I was really keen to pick his brain about was the motivation behind a cyberattack, something which I am sure that many of you have wondered. We know that cyberattacks happen and that is of course why everyone who uses a computer should ensure that they have up to date security software installed on their devices and network.
The big question is however, why do people hack, why do they leave viruses and what are they looking to gain? Let’s take a look.
Status
One of the most common motives which we see amongst the hacking community is that people are looking to raise their status and validate themselves. This far trumps the amount of people who are hacking with criminal intent. Whilst the act of hacking is of course illegal, those who take on the big companies are very rarely looking to commit any other crimes. There is a certain one upmanship which takes place amongst hackers and each new piece of security software is seen as a gauntlet that has been thrown down, and must be overcome.
Criminal
There are of course many hackers out there who are directly looking to steal information or money from the victim of their attacks. What we actually see in more cases than not is that these are hackers for hire, and they don’t directly benefit from what they steal when they breach a particular system. These hackers will be paid by someone to breach a system and obtain sensitive business information or personal details which they will then use for criminal activities. The hacker in the case will be paid a set amount for the information.
Disruption
Very often we see asking groups looking to cause mass disruption either just to be a nuisance or to cause a business or an individual serious problems. For example we have seen groups like the hacking collective Anonymous, target many politicians and wealthy individuals with DDoS attacks to bring down their websites or they social media pages as an act of rebellion based on the behaviors of the individual. Sometimes these disruption hacks, generally these are DDoS attacks, will be done as a show of strength by a hacker or a hacking group, just to showcase what they can do should they have to.
Ethical
There is a small branch of hackers who work as ethical hackers, these men and women are paid by security companies and private businesses to test the security which they have, and to actively try to breach their systems. These ethical hackers adequate literally paid to hack and they contribute greatly to the improvement of security software and systems.
As you can see, there are a number of reasons why people hack.
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