In Brief If you can't join them, then you may as well try to beat them – at least if you're a talented security engineer looking for a job and you happen to be a woman.
As we've noted before, the infosec world moves at a glacial pace toward gender equity. 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 (now defunct) Raidforum. And it inspected five Russian-language sites: XSS, Exploit, Vavilon, BHF and WWH-Club.
To be fair, Trend Micro's methodology is a bit iffy – and the report itself admits as much. Users on these forums are are largely anonymous, necessitating use of tools like Semrush and uClassify's Gender Analyzer V5 to make what amounts to guesses – at best.
Nonetheless, 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.
"When compared to Stack Overflow, a developer and programming forum, only 12 percent of visitors were female," Trend Micro said of its use of Semrush.
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 ..
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