The Mercenary User Type

With the news that a hacker group is using gamification to try and get people to engage in DDoS attacks, I got to thinking about what type of user may wish to engage with this.

Initially, the Disruptor sprang to mind, more specifically the Destroyer type. They act on the system to disrupt it and normally for not very nice reasons! However, there was an issue. Disruptors are self-motivated, they are not there for reward as much as recognition or just plain mastery and enjoyment. So using points and prizes to coerce a disruptor behaviour actually sits more in line with the Consumer type in the Player section of the Hexad.

However, that was not neat enough as a Consumer Destroyer type just sounds odd! I could call them Player Disruptors, but again, not very neat. So then. What do you call someone who does disruptive things for points and prizes? A Mercenary!

So there you have it. No, I won’t be officially adding this to the types, we have enough already and you can use combo names, but I thought it was an interesting take on disruptors, one I had not really seen before in the gamification world.

Check out the article about the DDoS for Points scheme! https://blogs.forcepoint.com/security-labs/sledgehammer-gamification-ddos-attacks

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