Why do hackers do the things they do?

Hackers, as children we were taught that hackers were people who did diabolical things. But as we grew older, we have realised that is does not apply to all of them. Firstly, you have the White Hat Hackers, these hackers use their skill set to get a positive outcome. Then you have Grey Hat Hackers, they mean good in the end, but their job does cause them do break a few laws. Lastly and by far the worst, Black Hat Hackers these types of hackers not only break laws, but they don’t mean for it to cause any beneficial results. These three types of hackers make up the database, and thus companies and several other individuals rely on these sources for all their technological needs.

Movies have shown us hackers before, so we all have a rough concept of how they work, what they do, but never why they do it. Majority of movies do not go into the phycology of how hackers think and how they get led into this profession. There are many reasons as to why certain hackers lead their life that way. Their life is becoming easier yet harder at the same time. They have new devices every day since everything is now digitally available, but with technology becoming so advanced devices are getting harder to get information out of. Several companies are catching up with how their databases are broken into and putting up various restrictions such as firewalls e.t.c. So why do hackers do it? For the thrill, for the money, the fame, the greed.

Money, financial gain is what drives a lot of people despite their job. The money hackers earn is not always because they had someone hire them. Making it easy as a ‘self-employed job’. A lot of hackers seek such data and sell it on the dark web for much more money. While you may think people would not support this, companies pay billions of euros per year to get digital footprints and various other digital information of their employees. The money hackers earn gives them a sense of power they might not get on a daily basis. Such as someone who is seen as a loner, idiotic or someone who sleeps in their mums’ basement. For others they lean towards such jobs because of their conditions, with inflation rising at such a high rate more people are getting desperate for money. And hacking is a easy profession to earn money in, several low-level hackers are hired on a weekly basis. There are said to be few black hat hackers who make one million euros each year, but they of course have much more experience than someone who is considerably new to this profession. It is harder for a hacker to earn when a company doesn’t ‘sponsor’ them as money from the dark web is hard to verify, if not impossible. But once you figure it out it should be pretty easy to verify any money earned later on.

Hacking still isn’t all about money though. Some people who seek revenge do it just to gain information about the person. This is done by companies if they needed to target any specific audience, or psychopaths. Major companies do this because if they don’t their business could potentially plummet to the ground. These case scenarios are not as rare as you might think, companies get threats on a day-to-day basis and once these threats feel as though they might be getting serious several people are hired to look into and find out who to stop it from occurring. These companies don’t care about the money they spend on it, as they are usually worth billions of euros. All they need is for the target to back off and stop attacking their company. Black hat hackers can indeed complete that job. Others do this as well as a twisted way of making someone feel guilt, or as mentioned before seeking revenge on someone. Many of these people as classified as psychopaths because of their personality traits.

Some hackers want neither the money nor the information. They are driven because they want to have a sense of power to hold over everyone. They want to hold the power over everyone because maybe as children they get enough love, or they just the like attention. These hackers have a different mindset as well, while most hackers would lay low and make sure no one caught them, these hackers want people to see them do what they do. They crave the attention and to them living a life in prison with everyone knowing their name seems better than living a life where no one knows their name. These kind of hackers usually have no family and live in very depressing conditions. Even though they live alone they like the attention. Some types just like seeing the horrible things they’ve done plastered on the news. So maybe some of them do in fact lay low.

In my personal opinion, I feel as though I black hat hackers aren’t all that bad. For example, people who need to resort to this because of financial issues as a last resort didn’t really have a choice. It was more of a survival factor for them. But for people who do it just for the greed, fame and money, I feel as though they really shouldn’t do it unless its for good, but that’s a completely different type. Even major companies such as Microsoft and Facebook have faced serious breaches. So you could argue they shouldn’t stop as they’re good at what they do. But it does harm million of people in-fact 3 billion people were effected in the yahoo breach itself. Now imagine the lives of the people who worked at the company. How many got fired? How many people were falsely accused about committing the crime? It is really bad and effects not only the victims but others as well. What do you think?