Security News > 2023 > March > Where are the women in cyber security? On the dark side, study suggests

It appears that's not the case in the cyber criminal underground, according to Trend Micro, which recently published a study in which it claims at least 30 percent - if not more - of cyber criminal forum users are women.

For its study, Trend Micro looked at five English-language cyber crime forums: Sinister, Cracked, Breached, Hackforums and Raidforum.

To be fair, Trend Micro's methodology is a bit iffy - and the report itself admits as much.

Trend Micro said it analyzed posts and traffic on the ten forums and found that, for English language sites, some 40 percent of users appear to be women, and 42.6 percent of Russian cyber crime forum users were women, or at least write like them.

Gender Analyzer V5 is trained on 5,500 blog posts written by women, and the same number by men, in order to analyze language for signs of gendered usage, which Trend Micro used to analyze a subset of profiles on English site Hackforums and Russian XSS. According to the report, 36 percent of users at Hackforums were likely women based on their use of language, and 30 percent of XSS forum users were reportedly women based on the same analysis.

"Developers are valued for their skills and experience, and not necessarily for their gender when it comes to conducting business in the underground," Trend Micro said.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/in_brief_security/