Gender Diversity in Cybercrime Forums: The Rise of Female Users

The report shows that 36% of users on the Hackforums forum are female, according to terminology analysis; and 30% of users of the Russian-language cybercrime forum XSS are female.

In recent years, there has been a gradual trend toward gender parity on underground cybercrime forums. This is in contrast to the male-dominated cybersecurity industry, where women working in cybersecurity continue to face significant barriers to entry and advancement.

A recent research study released by Trend Micro came to a similar conclusion: at least 30 percent of cybercrime forum users are women. While the methodology used in this study makes the results slightly unreliable, the report itself acknowledges this.

Trend Micro surveyed five English-language cybercrime forums: Sinister, Cracked, Breached, Hackforums, and (the now-defunct) Raidforum, as well as five Russian-language cybercrime sites: XSS, Exploit, Vavilon, BHF, and WWWH-Club.

Because these sites are primarily viewed by anonymous users, the researchers used tools such as Semrush and uClassify’s Gender Analyzer V5 to estimate the number of female users.

The report shows that 36 percent of Hackforums users are likely to be female based on an analysis of terminology habits, while 30 percent of XSS…