:: netwoman's blog ::

Can women be Hackers, or are they just Women?

Joan Korenman sent me a great link to a blog post today (thanks Joan!).

The blog is called "feminist poet crypto geek", and she has a great post on women as Hackers, and the lack of respect they receive. Raven posted some thoughts on a list serv in response to other absurd comments made. Here are some of her comments:

"I got seventeen requests for a date, two marriage proposals, three offers for various sexual acts, and a request for naked pictures of me. I also got ten real comments about the technical contents of my post. Et tu, Bugtraq? This asinine refusal to treat female geeks as geeks first is incredibly offputting. If I wanted to be objectified sexually every time I tried to interact with someone professionally, I'd be on the corner of 14th Street, not pursuing a career in network security. So let me spell this out for you in small words, so that you cretins who can't seem to grasp the concept that your behaviour is unattractive will understand.

I am a hacker. I run OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and five flavors of Linux. I have done custom kernel work on almost every box I own. I write documentation for Linux. I watch the intrusion detection systems for the Nessus servers. I am authoring a book on Snort, and I have an account on attrition.org. I speak at conferences. I do technical fact-checking for the Hacker Court people, I spoke about cryptography in Dublin at Linux World Expo, and about proactive backbone provider security in Vegas at DefCon. My team came in second in Capture the Flag. My code traces DDoS attacks across major ISP backbones worldwide. I do system testing and performance benchmarking. I have found bugs in the crypto implementations of major security vendors, and have seen them fixed because of my work. I have found zero-day vulnerabilities in major security products. I code my own exploits and I run pen-tests for fun. I am a hacker."

You must go read the full post .

posted by Netwoman @ 9:24 PM