I realise hacking is just one aspect of that, but I was curious, what motivates hackers to hack things?
Social engineering is an extension of this. People make the same mistakes consistently. So many people believe that correct horse battery staple trick, and there's even a generator for it that you can utilise it for dictionary attacks. Many people use root or admin as their login. But how many?
There's a trick I did once in a game, where there were preset images in a dropdown. These images would actually point to a url and pass that to the server. But you could inspect element and type whatever URL you like. This trick is fun the first time, but every time I see this pattern, I try to see if it works.
Nick Espinosa's talk: 'The five laws of cybersecurity' is a must view if you want a baseline understanding of cybersecurity.
Basically if something's vulnerable, it will be hacked: no exceptions. What motivates someone to hack? It used to be for the lolz, now people are submitting bug bounties to zero-day brokers. The landscape has changed. People don't hack for free anymore.
https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_espinosa_the_five_laws_of_cyb...