The document discusses the evolution of hackers from juvenile pranksters to sophisticated criminals with various motivations, including financial gain, corporate espionage, and political activism. It categorizes hackers into 10 types, including bank robbers, nation-state operatives, corporate spies, and hacktivists, outlining their methods and objectives. The document emphasizes the need for strong cybersecurity measures to combat these diverse threats.

2. Introduction
• Understanding the different types of
hackers, what motivates them, and the
malware they use can help you identify and
defend yourself and your organization.
• Hackers have matured since the days of
pulling juvenile pranks like popup windows
of annoying songs that you couldn’t shut off.
• As computers have evolved into a necessary
part of the economy, hackers have evolved
out of those wide-eyed nerds into an army
of criminals.

3. Introduction
• Computers are no longer games, and
hackers are no longer playing around.
• Today’s hackers are skilled professionals
with serious jobs.
• They are paid well, have human resource
teams, and take holidays off.
• You may wonder, what are those jobs?
• The hacker employee profile is as diverse as
the ways people earn money or power, but
they fall, roughly, into 10 basic types.

4. 1. The bank robber
Once there were bank robbers who
rode horses and pointed guns as
they stole money from banks,
travelers, merchants and anyone
offering an easy target.
Today's financial hackers ride into
town on ransomware and use fake
invoices, dating scams, fake checks,
fake escrow intermediaries, denial-
of-service attacks, and any other
scam or hack that will help them
steal money from company’s banks
and stock accounts.

5. 2. The nation-state
• Today, most sophisticated nations have tens of thousands of skilled hackers on the payroll.
• Their job? Sneak behind enemy lines at other nations’ military and industrial networks to map assets and install malicious back
doors.
• These are just the big stories. Nation-state hacking happens all the time, mostly quietly, and it isn’t going anywhere.
• The attacking nation certainly won’t do anything to prevent it or punish the hackers because they are soldiers doing their job to
further that country’s objectives.

6. 3. The corporate spy
• For many hackers, a day in the office
involves stealing corporate intellectual
property, either to resell for personal
profit or to further the objectives of the
nation state that employs them.
• A common type of corporate espionage is
to steal secret patents, future business
plans, financial data, contracts, health
data, and even the notes of legal disputes.
• Anything that gives competitors a leg up
on the hacked organization is fair game.

7. 4. The professional hacking group for hire
• This is a relatively recent phenomenon where a group of expert hackers develop, buy or steal powerful malware and
offer advanced-persistent-threat services to target their skills and tools for a fee.
• The goal might be financial gain, disrupting a competitor or enemy, or theft of valuable data or intellectual property.
• Their clients might be nation-states, companies interested in corporate espionage, or other criminal groups looking to
resell what the hackers steal.

8. 5. The rogue gamer
• For millions of people, gaming is a serious business.
• It has spawned an industry that’s worth billions of dollars.
• The gaming industry has its own specialized hackers.
• They steal their competitors' credit caches or cause anti-competitive distributed denial-of-service
attacks.

9. 6. Cryptojackers
• Harnessing other people’s computing power is a trick that hackers, and
legitimate endeavors, have used since computers first started landing on a
desk.
• It is where hackers use other people’s hard drives to store large files such
as videos.

10. 7. The hacktivists
• Hackivists use hacking to make
a political statement or
promote social change.
• They either want to steal
embarrassing information from
a victim company, cause
operational issues for the
company, or wreak havoc that
will cost the victim company
money or bring attention to the
hacktivist’s cause.

11. 8. The botnet masters
• Many malware coders create bots to be sent
out into the world to infect as many
computers as they can.
• The goal is to form large botnet armies that
will do their evil bidding.
• Once your computer becomes their minion, it
sits waiting for instruction from its master.
• These instructions usually come from
command-and-control servers.
• The botnet can be used directly by the
botnet creator but more often that master
rents it out to whoever wants to pay.
• According to some experts, one-fifth of the
world’s computers have been part of a
botnet army.

12. 9. The adware spammer
• You’re lucky if your company
is only compromised by a spam malware
program or your browser is only hijacked
by an adware program that is looking to
sell you something.
• Adware works by redirecting your browser
to a site you did not intend to go to.
• Perhaps you were searching for “car
rental” and the adware program sent you
instead to “vacation discounts.”
• Spam and adware might not seem like a
huge threat, but it can be a symptom of a
serious system leak.

13. 10. The thrill hacker
• Most hackers work with a financial goal in mind with malicious motives or are trying to achieve a political goal.
• A class of hacker remains who is in it for the thrill.
• They may want to demonstrate what they can do.
• There are not as many thrill seekers anymore because hacking, whatever the motives, breaks laws and
prosecution is a real possibility.

14. TAKE ACTION!
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you need an experienced cybersecurity
team on your side with artificial
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Guard 365 has proven to be the answer
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