PESTEL Analysis of Hacktivism Campaign Motivations

A political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, environment and legal (PESTEL) analysis is a framework or tool used to analyse and monitor the macro-environmental factors that have an impact on an organisation. The results identify threats and weaknesses which are used in a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. In this paper the PESTEL framework was utilized to categorize hacktivism motivations for attack campaigns against certain companies, governments or industries. Our study is based on empirical evidence: of thirty-three hacktivism attack campaigns in manifesto level. Then, the targets of these campaigns were analysed and studied accordingly. As a result, we claim that connecting cyberattacks to motivations permits organizations to determine their external cyberattack risks, allowing them to perform more accurate risk-modeling.