Linux Server Security, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Components of Risk

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7

Motives

Many of the threats are fairly obvious and easy to understand. We all know that

business competitors wish to make more money and disgruntled ex-employees often

want revenge for perceived or real wrongdoings. Other motives aren’t so easy to pin

down. Even though it’s seldom addressed directly in threat analysis, there’s some

value in discussing the motives of people who commit computer crimes.

Attacks on data confidentiality, data integrity, system integrity, and system availabil-

ity correspond pretty convincingly to the physical-world crimes of espionage, fraud,

breaking and entering, and sabotage, respectively. Those crimes are committed for

every imaginable motive. As it happens, computer criminals are driven by pretty

much the same motives as “real-life” criminals (albeit in different proportions). For

both physical and electronic crime, motives tend to fall into a small number of cate-

gories.

Financial motives

One of the most compelling and understandable reasons for computer crime is

money. Thieves use the Internet to steal and barter credit card numbers so they can

bilk credit card companies (and the merchants who subscribe to their services).

Employers pay industrial spies to break into their competitors’ systems and steal pro-

prietary data. And