Rational Choice Observation of Malware Authors in Taiwan

Abstract

Cybercrime is a significantly new phenomenon, which is facilitated by the internet. The internet not only makes it much easier for malware authors or hackers to bypass national boundaries, but also offer more sophisticated techniques to support malicious program creation for malware authors. This paper outlines an observation from Taiwan malware authors in past decades. The case description and author behavior in rational choice theories is discussed. The goal is to analyze their mentality and thinking patterns from a standpoint of rational choice theory. Profit emerges as a main factor in repeat offenders. They freely choose to write malicious programs after rational evaluation where the anticipated costs and the expected benefits are weighed against each other.