Experts find that 3 out of 10 cybercriminals are women

TrendMicro has revealed the gender of hackers in its latest study, busting the myth that cybercriminals are only men.

Although it is difficult to determine the exact demographics of hackers, TrendMicro experts said that 30% of cybercriminals are women. The researchers came to this conclusion using the SEMrush tool and artificial intelligence technologies. In the study, TrendMicro analyzed 10 popular cybercrime forums: Sinister, Cracked, Breached, Hackforums, Raidforum, XSS, Exploit, Pavilion, BHF, and WWH-Club.

According to analysts, women used to prefer not to disclose their gender in order to better «conduct business.» Perhaps in the past, representatives of criminal groups paid more attention to gender and might have doubted the professional qualities of a female hacker. However, nowadays, gender has become less important in such communities.

According to an analysis by SEMrush, on most cybercrime forums, about 40% of visitors were girls on average. However, in the English-language Sinister forum, this figure was as high as 61%. And only 12% of girls were noted on the Stack Overflow forum dedicated to programming and development.

To be more accurate, the researchers resorted to another way to determine the gender of potential candidates. They analyzed the posts written by forum users using the machine learning tool Gender Analyzer V5, which can accurately determine the gender of the author based on the style of the text.

After summarizing all the data, TrendMicro experts concluded that about 3 out of 10 cybercriminals identify themselves as women. And according to a study by ISC2, a company that trains IT security professionals, women currently make up about a quarter of the total number of employees in cybersecurity companies.

As a reminder, the share of cryptocurrency ownership among women increased from 29% in the third quarter of 2022 to 34% at the end of the year. According to eToro analysts, cryptocurrencies have become the second most popular asset class among women, second only to cash.