"At Least 30% of 'Cyber-Criminals' Are Women: Report"

According to a news study by Trend Micro, female participation in cybercrime is far higher than any other type of crime.  The researchers used the machine learning web service Gender Analyzer V5 to analyze text written by 50 random users of the Russian-language XSS forum and 50 users of the English-language Hackforums site.  It revealed that 30% of those XSS forum users were women, rising to 36% of Hackforums users.  The researchers noted that their control group consisted of 10 aliases that posted their gender profiles online and identified themselves as women from XSS and Hackforums.  When they 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%.  The researchers also used a separate AI tool to ascertain the gender of cybercrime forum users.  Semrush is billed as a search engine marketing solution.  It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze 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.  The researchers noted that, by contrast, 4–8% of the prison population in the UK, Russia, and the US is female.  The researchers stated that if accurate, the findings would also indicate that a higher percentage of women participate in cybercrime than currently work in the cybersecurity industry.  The latest estimates from ISC2 put this figure at around 24%, although it does rise to 30% in the under-30s.  Trend Micro argued that the cybercrime economy appears generally welcoming of all individuals as long as they have the right skills and experience.
 

Infosecurity reports: "At Least 30% of 'Cyber-Criminals' Are Women: Report"