At Least 30% of “Cyber-Criminals” Are Women: Report

Female participation in cybercrime is considerably higher than for all types of crime, in accordance to a new report which raises some interesting thoughts about doable gender bias in investigations.

Trend Micro utilised equipment studying web support Gender Analyzer V5 to assess textual content created by 50 random customers of the Russian-language XSS discussion board and 50 customers of the English-language Hackforums web-site.

It unveiled that 30% of all those XSS forum end users had been women, climbing to 36% of Hackforums consumers.

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“Our manage team consisted of 10 aliases that posted their gender profiles on the internet and recognized by themselves as women of all ages from XSS and Hackforums,” the report observed. “When we ran posts from these people as a result of the text analyzer, benefits indicated that all the aliases have been labeled as feminine with an regular classifier share of 82.4%.”

The report authors also applied a individual AI resource to confirm the gender of cybercrime discussion board users. Semrush is billed as a look for engine marketing remedy. It works by using equipment finding out algorithms to examine information from social networks and other third-party sources, in purchase to determine the demographic data of web consumers, this kind of as gender.

Its examination claimed an even increased proportion of dark web forum consumers were females: 41% of XSS users and 40% of Hackforums users.

By contrast, 4–8% of the jail population in the UK, Russia and US is female, in accordance to knowledge cited in the report.

If correct, the conclusions would also show that a increased share of women take part in cybercrime than at present get the job done in the cybersecurity industry. The most current estimates from ISC2 place this figure at all around 24%, although it does increase to 30% in the less than-30s.

Development Micro argued that the cybercrime financial system appears normally welcoming of all persons as very long as they have the right skills and working experience.

That should really be a reminder to investigators never to suppose a malicious actor’s gender, it concluded.

“It is our recommendation for all investigators to steer clear of assumptions of male personas whilst carrying out their get the job done (these types of as referring to a suspect as ‘he’ or ‘his’) as this creates an inherent bias as they progress their scenario,” the report famous.

“We recommend as an alternative to use ‘they,’ which will not only address any gender associated, but also power investigators to factor in that far more than 1 individual could be guiding a solitary moniker underneath investigation.”