It’s an interesting question because not all Hackers are the same. Some want to steal your data for their own purposes, some are seeking a ransom and some want to block your service to benefit them in some way.

Some hackers are motivated by money; some are doing it for the notoriety.

Firstly – who or what is a ‘Hacker’? For the purposes of this article, we’ll refer to a Hacker as people who want to gain unauthorised access to systems for malicious purposes.

Type of Cyber-attack	Description & Motivations
Exploiting data	Stolen data can be used to steal more information or assets from the parties affected
Holding data ransom	Data is encrypted (i.e. locked up) and the key to unlock the data is only provided once a ransom fee has been paid
Stealing Infrastructure	Gaining access to computing resources without paying for them. The motivation can either be to serve ads illegally (but still collect advertising revenues) or use the stolen resources to launch a further attack. The latter will give authorities the impression that an innocent (but compromised) server is the culprit for a larger attack
Denying Service	A denial-of-service (DoS) attack aims to prevent a website or other service from working. Why do this? Much of the time it’s just because the Hacker can – purely for boasting rights.

It’s always been difficult to defend against such attacks, given the motivating factors.

Rock IT has been helping Australian businesses for over 14 years to keep them as secure as possible. If you’re concerned about your Cybersecurity, give us a call.