While hackers carry out their exploits to infiltrate into a network, hardly any of them think of the repurcusions of their ‘hacktivities’, with 86% of hackers believing that they won’t be caught, a survey on hackers found.
The survey was conducted by security solutions provider Thycotic, on 127 self-identified hackers at the BlackHat USA, to better understand the fears, expectations and motivations of hackers.
51% of them said that the thrill of hacking motivated them, while just 19% said that financial gain was a direct motivation and 1%of them want notoriety.
The survey found that contrary to the majority of news reports that hackers are lured by lucre, more than half of the hackers are ‘simply curious, bored, or want to test out their abilities’.
About 40% of those surveyed said that they would likely target IT contractors to gain login details while 30% of them said to target IT administrators, and only 6% would target executives for sensitive login credentials.
More than 99% of those sampled said that phishing and spoofing are their "tried and true" weapons of attack, which are still giving them returns on exploits.
With the overwhelming number of hackers prefer phishing and spoofing as tools, the severity of attack is not synonymous with complexity, as hackers can use simple techniques to gain a variety of sensitive information.
Interestingly, about 88% of respondents believe their own personally identifiable information is at risk of attack, which could be a wakeup call for enterprises, as far as how they protect their data is concerned.
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