• Rebelliousness, challenging the authorities (not only police and government agencies but also system administrators, teachers, parents, and adults in general) so they can show their “hacker power” and feel superior.
• A sense of adventure, the adrenalin rush, the thrill of doing something forbidden, or the fact of owning a system, of “defeating” a PC by making it do one’s bidding.
• Bored by routine.
• Romanticism, tradition, the “myth;” in other words, because it’s “cool.”
• To attract media attention in the hope of becoming famous.
• For money.
• Anger and frustration.
• Political reasons.

• Attracted by the camaraderie in the hacker community.
• To escape a conflicting family environment and alienating social reality.
• Professional reasons (computer security experts, cyber-warriors, industrial spies, government agents, and military hackers).

We mustn’t forget that motives change with the generations. First-generation hackers (at the end of the 1970s) were fired up by the thirst for knowledge.

The second (first half of the 1980s) were impelled by curiosity, joined with the thirst for knowledge and the fact that many operating systems could only become familiar by “penetrating“ them. Later, toward the second half of the 1980s, hacking became more wide-spread, partly because by now it was a fashion, a fad.

The third generation (1990s) simply wanted to do hacking, which implied wanting to learn and get to know something new, with the intention to violate computer systems and exchange information in the underground community. In this phase, the first hacker groups came on the scene, e-zine hackers arose, and BBSs started developing.

The fourth and last generation (of the year 2000) is impelled by anger. Often, they don’t have many technical skills but consider being a hacker fashionable; they don’t know or aren’t interested in the history, the culture, or the ethics of phreaking and hacking. Here hacking is mixed with politics and becomes cyber hacktivism.