Women’s participation in cybercrime far exceeds all types of crime, according to a new report, raising interesting questions about possible gender bias in investigations.
Trend Micro used machine learning web service Gender Analyzer V5 to analyze text written by 50 random users of the Russian-language XSS forums and 50 users of the English-language Hackforums site.
It turns out that 30% of these XSS forum users are female, rising to 36% of Hackforums users.
“Our control group consisted of 10 aliases who posted their gender profiles online and revealed themselves as women from XSS and Hackforums,” the report said. “We ran the posts from these users through her analyzer and found that all aliases were classified as female, with an average percentage of classifiers of 82.4% for her.”
The authors of the report used another AI tool to determine the gender of cybercrime forum users. Semrush is billed as a search engine marketing solution. We use machine learning algorithms to analyze data from social networks and other third-party Her sources to determine demographic information about Her web users, such as gender.
According to that analysis, an even higher percentage of dark web forum users were female, with 41% of XSS users and 40% of Hackforums users.
In contrast, 4-8% of prison populations in the UK, Russia and the US are women, according to data cited in the report.
If the findings are accurate, it would also indicate that a higher percentage of women participate in cybercrime than women currently working in the cybersecurity industry. The latest estimates from ISC2 put this figure at around 24%, but for those under 30 she rises to 30%.
Trend Micro argued that the cybercriminal economy generally appears to welcome all individuals as long as they have the right skills and experience.
It concludes that this is a reminder to investigators to never assume the gender of a malicious person.
“All investigators avoid assuming a male persona (such as referring to a suspect as ‘his’ or ‘his’) in carrying out their work, as this creates an inherent bias in conducting an investigation.” recommended,” the report said. I got it.
“We recommend using ‘they’ instead, as this not only covers the gender involved, but also recognizes that there may be multiple people behind a single name under investigation. I will force investigators to take it into account.”
