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Cybersecurity needs women

Safeguarding our lives online requires skills and experiences that lie beyond masculine stereotypes of the hacker and soldier, says Winifred R. Poster.
  1. Winifred R. Poster

    1. Winifred R. Poster is a lecturer in international affairs at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

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Computer hacking is becoming more widespread and damaging. Headlines highlight attacks on government agencies, political campaign offices, financial institutions and big corporations. But citizens and consumers are paying a heavy price. In 2016, 2 billion people had their personal details stolen, including the medical records of more than 100 million Americans. Hacks of US retail outlets such as Target and global credit companies such as Equifax compromised the private data of hundreds of millions of customers. In the past 6 years, more than US$107 billion was stolen from US consumers through identity theft.

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Nature 555, 577-580 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-03327-w

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 16 May 2018: In an earlier version of this article, the photo of female programmers was captioned incorrectly. The women were at the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory in 1962, not working on ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s (see also K. Shirriff Nature 557, 309; 2018). Also, the figure of 57% originally cited for women in the US workforce was actually for women in the US professional workforce.

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