Hackers gonna hack, but why? Maybe Freud has the answer

Cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken thinks we need to understand cybercriminal motivations, while mentoring young people with tech and hacking skills

"A humanistic, cognitive psychology approach to hacking would be to consider an emotion such as revenge" But my favourite explanation for the academic literature is a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to hacking, which actually conceptualises hacking in Freudian terms as a cyber-sexual urge to penetrate. And there are castration complex overtones in terms of being cut off from the network as well""

Mary Aiken knows what she's talking about: she's the cyberpsychology expert whose work was the inspiration for TV show CSI: Cyber. In a speech at the Web Summit conference in Dublin, she suggested that we have a lot to learn still about the motivation of the people behind hacks of companies like Sony and TalkTalk.