One Third Of Cyber Criminals Are Women

Female engagement in cyber crime is now a lot higher than other parts of crime, according to a new report, which raises some interesting questions about possible gender bias in investigations. In a research paper Trend Micro show that while female cyber criminals are in the minority, they most certainly do exist in large numbers and they say an investigator should be open to this possibility from the start.

It revealed that 30% of those XSS forum users were women, rising to 36% of Hackforums users. XSS and Hack Forums are popular entrances into the world of criminal hacking, with tutorials and millions of posts teaching the relevant skills.  

“Our control group consisted of 10 aliases that posted their gender profiles online and identified themselves as women from XSS and Hackforums,” the report noted. “When we ran posts from these users through the text analyzer, results indicated that all the aliases were classified as female with an average classifier percentage of 82.4%.”

Trend Micro's researchers also used an  AI tool to discover the gender of cyber crime forum users. Semrush is an SaaS  search engine marketing solution that uses machine learning algorithms to analyse data from social networks and other third-party sources, in order to determine the demographic information of web users, such as gender. Its analysis claimed an even higher percentage of dark web forum users were women: 41% of XSS users and 40% of Hackforums users.

By contrast, 4–8% of the prison population in the UK, Russia and US is female, according to data cited in the report. If accurate, the findings would also indicate that a higher percentage of women participate in cyber crime than currently work in the cyber security industry. The latest estimates from ISC2 say the number is about 24%, although it increases to 30% in the under-30s.

Trend Micro suggest that the cyber crime economy appears generally welcoming of all individuals so long as they have the right skills and experience. This is in contrast to the 'legitimate' industry where sexism is prevalent. 

That should be a reminder to investigators never to assume a malicious actor’s gender, it concluded. “It is our recommendation for all investigators to avoid assumptions of male personas while carrying out their work - such as referring to a suspect as ‘he’ or ‘his’ - as this creates an inherent bias as they progress their case,” says the Report.

Various academic research has found that there are complex reasons behind the very low percentage of women working in the cyber security industry. Yet women could be the key to overcoming the shortage of skilled workers required to combat the growing threat of online crime.

Trend Micro:   Jo. Advances in Humabities:    Infosecurity Magazine:      ICS2:    Cyber Peace Inst.:   

Cybesecurity Ventures:     Krebs on Security:    Heimdal Security:   

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