Analysts examined five English hacker forums (Sinister, Cracked, Breached, Hackforums and the now-closed Raidforum) to understand the target audience of underground sources, as well as five Russian forums (XSS, Exploit, Vavilon, BHF and WWH-). club).

what is known

Because cybercrime sites always prioritize anonymity, researchers had to enlist the help of specialized tools, including the uClassify Gender Analyzer V5 artificial intelligence. As a control example, the data was compared to Stack Overflow (a popular question-and-answer system for professional programmers and geeks) and Reddit.

As a result, after analysis using the Semrush analytics tool, the following became clear:

• About 40% of visitors to English hacking forums are women.
• There are slightly more women in Russian sources — 42.6%.

The site that attracts the largest number of female viewers among the sites reviewed, according to analysts. Sinister – 61% of users are female.

Gender Analyzer V5 showed a slightly different picture. The experts studied a control group of 10 users who posted their profiles online and identified themselves as women on XSS and Hackforums. After running these users’ messages through a text analyzer, all profiles were found to be classified as female with 82.4% accuracy.

• Trend Micro experts then randomly checked 50 accounts from the XSS forum (the average account was created about 31 months ago and contained about 704 messages). This time the text parser showed: Of 50 casual users, 70% were men and 30% were women.
• A similar review of 50 random profiles was done on Hackforums, where the average age of the account is 32 months and contains about 947 posts. The results showed that profiles were male in 64% of cases and females in 36%.

It is customary to believe that the majority of cybercriminals are men. However, gender bias (overt or covert) can seriously affect a criminal investigation. Law enforcement and other investigators should not make automatic assumptions about the gender of the offender. Our analysis showed that at least 30% of participants in underground forums may be women, even if they do not openly discuss their gender profile online.
– summarize the researchers.

They also add that criminal hacking circles are one of the most valuable online communities. So when it comes to doing business, people here are only valued for their skills and experience, not their gender.