Successful missions depend on the ability of an organization to collect, manage, analyze, and secure its data. This study explores the motivation of cyber attackers to understand how cyber defenders can better protect organization data. Recent advances in information and computing technologies have led to increased parity in the knowledge and skillsets of attackers and defenders. Historically, the advantage has favored attackers because successful attacks need identify and penetrate only a key single vulnerability to enter into an organization’s environment. Defenders, however, must protect and secure the entire information technology (IT) infrastructure—a far greater requirement. Although an increased focus on better cybersecurity practices and technology advancements have seen progress made defensively, attackers still hold a marked advantage. To recoup the advantage from attackers, defenders must employ a more balanced, comprehensive strategic approach. By implementing a variety of different statistical and machine learning algorithms, it was possible to link network traffic anomalies to attackers and gain valuable insight from the motivations of cyber attackers. The results show that the attacker motivations in conjunction with monitoring data over its lifecycle can strengthen the security posture of cyber defenders so that the organizations can better protect and secure their data assets.