>I believe most crackers (I still consider "hacker" an honourable term) are motivated to make money:
>
>- creation of botnets for various purposes
>- keylogging for identity theft
>- sending spam (phishing etc.)
>
>More and more, their goal is specifically NOT to create havoc (within the cracked machine or OS). Much better to install a hard-to-detect rootkit, which never uses more than 10% CPU and will basically never be noticed by the average user. An analogy would be the prevalence of parasites in plant and animal populations - if the parasite is too virulent, the host dies, which is not optimal for the parasite.
>
>Impact is increasingly targeted (phishing against specific financial institutions, DDoS attacks etc.) Admittedly, systems may be targeted for reasons other than money (political, challenge, insanity, stupidity) but that makes it even more difficult to determine the "reward" portion of any reward/effort ratio used to find the "low-hanging fruit".
>

Hmmm... You are right about the changing/changed motivations of hackers2crackers. I was thinking more about the pathological hackers that get their yaa-yaas from having impact, any impact on their environment, disrputive or not. According to a psychologist friend of mine, this type of attention seeking is "based on a deep, existential desire to prove that the said seeker exists through having some effect on their environment." Go figure.

However, if a Cracker Equation is derived from the Hacker Equation by substituting H=Havoc with FC=Financial Gain, it would probably cover cracking as well, don't you think?

Delusions of Grandeur: Come to think of it, this equation could become a Global Equation of Desicion Making by substituting Havoc with You-Name-It... Which, eventually, might lead back to Energy=Mass times (Speed of Light squared), bridging physics and economics and behavioral and social sciences and, what the heck, even biology. Assuming that living organisms use math rather than tradition, genetic programming and conditioning when making decisions. A BIG if at that, I've found...