Cyber-attacks are ever more frequent and a lot of effort goes into both preventing and dealing with the consequences when they have happened.
Understanding the motivation behind attacks can help organisations understand more about the risks they face so that they can tackle them.
The main reasons behind an attack are:
- Financial Gain - targetting sensitive information which can be sold or used for blackmail.
- Data and Information Theft - targetting data which may be valuable, e.g. to a competing business or to another government
- For fun - not motivated by money, but for the thrill of carrying out an attack. Individuals carrying out attacks for fun aim to gain notoriety within their communities
- To disrupt business activity - aiming to disrupt a business to prevent them from providing a service to their customers.
- Personal attacks - driven by personal vendettas against a business or individual. They could be a disgruntled former employee or customer
