By Rob Douglas

One of the best reporters on the cybercrime beat, USA Today’s Jon Swartz, has a great piece this week looking at how digital thieves rationalize their crimes.  The piece, Hackers’ mind-set: They’ve done nothing wrong, examines Albert Gonzalez and Irving Jose Escobar, who were involved in stealing and using more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX and other retailers across the United States.

Are Cybercriminals Sociopaths?

Of Gonzalez and Escobar, Swartz writes,  “According to psychiatrists, hackers and computer-security experts, they represent the vanguard of cybercrooks: young, misguided males who rationalize that they’ve done nothing wrong.” 

In regards to cybercriminals more broadly, Swartz adds, “Many cybercrooks are young men in the U.S. and Eastern Europe who think they’re doing the system a favor by exposing flaws and have no qualms about opportunities to exploit rich Westerners, according to police, researchers and hackers.”

While I agree with Swartz’s portrayal of the cybercriminal mindset as one where they believe they’re innocent of any wrongdoing and are helping to point out weaknesses in the system, I would add that this doesn’t make cybercriminals all that different from traditional ones.  In twenty-five years of investigating hundreds of crimes - from murder, terrorism and political corruption to identity theft and cybercrime - I’ve found that most criminals share a sociopath’s view of their crimes.  Indeed, they rarely see their crimes as crimes at all and can rationalize their actions no matter how heinous the event.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of criminals and during the early years of my career came away amazed at what I perceived as their audacity in professing how they were the ones actually being wronged.  Over time, I realized that what I saw as audacity on the part of many criminals in their view of why their actions were not unlawful, or even wrong, was actually the workings of the mind of a sociopath.  Where society draws a line between right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, many criminals see no line at all.

So, while those who Swartz quotes in his piece accurately portray the rationalization cybercrooks employ in justifying their actions, I don’t believe this sets cybercriminals apart from any other type of criminal that society has confronted since the beginning of time.