Suicide gank

"Suicide ganking" refers to the practice of intentionally attacking enemies in high-security space with the intention of losing one's ship to Concord. The principle behind it is that some targets have very valuable items equipped and/or very valuable items in their cargo, and killing them and recovering the items that are dropped will pay for the costs incurred in losing the ships necessary to kill it. For example, if you attack an Iteron V full of a billion isk worth of stuff, you expect about half of it to drop when the ship is destroyed. If you lose an insured battleship fit with cheap gear(net cost: ~10 million isk) to kill it, then you've just earned 490 million of profit on average. Of course, if you fail to kill it then you're out 10 million, but that's a risk many suicide gankers are willing to take.

Suicide ganking was a popular strategy until recently, both with GoonSwarm's JihadSwarm campaign and with several groups of pirates who did it for profit. However, recent changes in game mechanics - faster Concord response time and higher security status losses for criminal actions in highsec - have largely eliminated the practice. It's still possible, and still practiced occasionally, but is much less common than it used to be.