A New Force Lurks Amid the Cyber Shadows : Technology: There’s a small but growing niche on the Internet: female hackers. And they’re out to prove they’re as smart-- and as nasty--as the guys.
Don’t mess with Irony if you know what’s best for you.
She’ll have your incoming phone calls routed into a 900-number phone-sex service, your credit report in ruins and your picture--superimposed in some sort of heinous act--circulating on the Internet, all in no time at all.
“I was talking to this hacker guy,” Irony says. “I said, ‘Do you think I’m some kind of hacker groupie?’ He said, ‘No, but I don’t think you’re cool, either.’ ”
So she did what any self-respecting hacker would do. She broke into his computer (via modem), posted all his files on a popular discussion group on the Internet and sent him a message along with the posting: “Hi there,” it said, with her handle attached. “He got the point,” she says.
And she was being easy on the guy.
Irony is a member of a small but growing niche on the Net: female hackers. As the global computer network grows in popularity, more women are logging on. Females constitute more than one-third of Internet users this year, according to Nielson Media Research. And some inevitably are joining the computer underworld, the vanguard for the influx of women on the Internet.
“We will see a lot more women hackers,” says Carla Sinclair, author of “Net Chick” (Henry Holt, 1995), an Internet guide for women. “In the past, women were taught to stay away. Now, with point-and-click, it’s very inviting.”
At a recent hacker conference in Tahoe, women made up 10% of the attendees--an all-time high. But while the numbers are growing, men’s respect for the women of the Internet may not be. Many female hackers feel besieged. That may be what makes them one of the more ardent female subcultures out there, one often affiliated, perhaps not by coincidence, with the so-called Riot Grrrl movement.
The ones willing to talk seem far from the movie-made image of goody-two-shoes hacker waifs in Gottex (“The Net,” “Hackers” et al.). A handful, like Irony, are fiercely competitive--ready, willing and able to prove their ability in a community that takes talk lightly and action seriously.
“Female hackers can be quite vicious if you get them angry, for they will use their skills against you,” says a male hacker who goes by the handle Master Midian.
Indeed, some women feel free to assert themselves where they might not in the real world.
“I think the online world can be a boot camp for girls,” says early hacker St. Jude Milhon, one of the founding editors of Berkeley-based Mondo 2000 magazine. “They’re not in physical danger. So they can be combative in effective ways.”
And in so many ways. . . . There’s phone phreaking (the art of getting free phone service, rerouting people’s phone lines, shutting down phone service for entire geographic areas), social engineering (feigning authority, usually over the phone, to get information) and straight-up hacking (generally, being a computer wizard with the ability to enter computer systems at will). Of course there are those who claim hacker status in the classic sense of promoting cyber-freedom--and not necessarily in the “dark-side” sense of promoting cyber-vandalism.
Although computer culture has traditionally been a boys club, women have made their contributions. Ada Lovelace, born in 1815, is reverently referred to as the first hacker--in the sense of being a master problem-solver. She was actually a math wizard who helped create a theory called “the Difference and Analytical Engines,” which is the foundation for the modern computer. Milhon calls her “our Eve, our Cybermother.”
Milhon herself started programming in the ‘60s and quickly fell in with the first generation of hackers in the ‘70s. Then there’s Susan Thunder, the infamous Los Angeles hacker who ran with hacker king Kevin Mitnick before he was arrested with 20,000 credit card numbers in his possession.
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Irony is a renaissance woman on the World Wide Web, an all-around Swiss Army hacker. She says she can double your phone bill, drain your bank account and is known to have switched the radio frequencies of hotel security guards and their local law enforcement agency.
She readily gives her secret weapon: “The skills that a female in the scene needs to gain access to things are completely different than what a man would need. If I needed to gain access to someone’s bank account, I wouldn’t really need to know how to hack. What I would need to do is social engineering.
“Girls have such a knack for social engineering,” says the East Coast hacker. “If there’s someone who doesn’t trust anyone, and doesn’t give out information, I could get it in a week, without fail. Guys could try for years and never get it.”
But it’s not as if she, and other women in the computer underground, don’t know their hardware. “If someone challenges me, I can do anything,” says Irony, a college dropout who studied aerospace engineering. “For example, there’s someone who’s begging for trouble. He’s harassing people, saying, ‘You guys aren’t real hackers.’ I have his full name, his Social Security number, his bank account, his real address. . . . I can’t refuse a dare.”
Rosie the Riveter is the 20-year-old daughter of computer programmers who’s been in front of the monitor for as long as she can remember. “My mother taught me how to program in Basic when I was 6,” she says.
Now she lives in a hacker house in the Boston area with one other woman and five men, each with their own specialty, geared more for gamesmanship than profit or vandalism. Hers is Virtual Memory Systems, an operating system used by banks, military bases, corporations, universities. Her roommates specialize in everything from phone phreaking to breaking into Unix operating systems.
“We’ll pick a sight and bang away at it,” she says. “If someone came into our system and tried to take us off the Net,” she adds, “we’d take them down.”
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Of course, there’s an unsexy side to hacking, one that requires a mental wrestling match with computer manuals. They provide the key to learning computer languages, operating systems and, for some dark-side hackers, corporate passwords and pass codes found in internal documents stolen through “Dumpster diving.”
“The real scene is working, studying, reading manuals, doing really boring text stuff,” Irony says. “The social scene is bragging about it.”
That’s what leads some young women--and men--in the computer underground to swim in the shallow end of cyberculture. They are sneeringly referred to as hacker groupies. And hard-core hackers, especially women, resent them.
“There are a lot of women in the underground [who] are there because they can easily gain the attention and admiration and ‘love’ of the men, who are in the majority, and who are relatively hard-up for women,” says 26-year-old hacker Jennifer Myers, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Northwestern University.
“A lot of guys expect me to be somebody’s girlfriend or a groupie,” Rosie adds.
And that leads to a curious phenomenon in the Internet underworld. While the cyber universe has been hyped as a utopian place--a great equalizer where people are not known by their skin tone, nationality or religion--a name-based handle (e-mail address) will often give your gender away. So many hacker women use men’s handles, or gender-neutral names.
“A lot of times I go by another handle because I don’t want to be recognized as female,” Rosie says. “So I don’t have to prove myself.”
There is, truth be told, a lot of business as usual on the Internet. Men often launch inappropriate come-ons or “flame” (criticize with inordinate amounts of e-mail) women who enter areas of the computer underworld traditionally dominated by men.
Sexism is alive and well in cyberspace. When asked to be interviewed for a story on hacker women, computer culture author Bruce Sterling sent this e-mail: “Ain’t no such thing.”
That attitude is reflected in other postings on newsgroups.
“Hacking is a guy thing,” writes one Netizen.
“Online men will be almost universally brutal,” says Milhon, author of the upcoming book “Grrrlz Need Modems” (due to be released next spring by Random House).
This has led to what David Dennis, owner of the Wonderful Women of the Web site (a menu that links visitors to dozens of female-owned Web sites), describes as “women only enclaves,” including newsgroups (basically electronic bulletin boards), Internet Relay Channels (real-time chat rooms) and World Wide Web sites (personalized billboards) that cater mainly to women and women hackers.
“If I were to give a message to the world of men,” says Dennis, a 33-year-old San Fernando Valley programmer, “it’s that they should try to be more civil than they are now.”
Romance does blossom. But to borrow a line from the annals of journalism, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.
“Once they know I’m female, every AOLer [America On-Line user] dip-s--- starts asking me for a friggin date,” says a hacker who goes by the handle Tankgrrl, interviewed via e-mail. “Every once in a while they persist and start getting nasty. They normally stop after I flood the living daylights out of their system and fill their in-boxes [e-mail boxes]. . . .”
Milhon doesn’t see all bad in the boy-girl hacker games that happen on the Net. She says in the long run, such “geek” guys end up being pretty nice face to face. That’s because, she reveals, they cherish the real-world contact they have with scarce female hackers.
Underneath the flaming and verbal hostility, Milhon says, “We rate the kind of reverent attention anything rare and wonderful merits. We are female, we are technical, we are dewy blue roses.”
