China's Hacker Girls

Xiao Tian, 19, is the ‘general’ of China’s newest army of female hackers, the Cn Girl Security Team - today, the group has over 2,200 members.

On Xiao Tian’s (小天) blog are plentiful photographs of the Chinese girl posing, well, girlishly. Don’t be misled, though, by her baby-doll looks, her puckered lips or even her moniker, which in Chinese means ‘A little bit of heaven’.

This isn’t some Pretty Young Thing advertising her charms on a dating site: Xiao Tian, 19, is the ‘general’ of China’s newest army of female hackers, the Cn Girl Security Team.

China’s community of hackers (komunitas hacker), who have waged ‘cyberwar’ on and broken into websites of governments across the world (including India), is still largely a “boy’s club” overrun by the gush of testosterone.

But increasingly, young girls - like Xiao Tian and her band of “hacker babes” — are breaking into this male-dominated domain with an eye on the “rock star” status that hackers enjoy in China, and the “career opportunities” opening up for established hackers.

Xiao Tian says she started up her group when she felt the need for a space for young girls like herself, who felt excluded from the male hackers’ world because their skills weren’t considered “good enough”.

Today, the group has over 2,200 members; although that number accounts for only a small proportion of China’s overall hacker population — estimated at about 4,00,000 — Xiao Tian’s group is probably the largest organisation of female Chinese hackers.

“In China, being a hacker is sort of like being a rock star,” Scott Henderson, a retired US army military intelligence analyst and author of The Dark Visitor: Inside the World of Chinese Hackers, told DNA.

“They give out souvenir T-shirts, caps and sunglasses, and they’re even close to landing movie deals!” A few years ago, a survey of middle-school children’s career aspirations revealed that a third of them wanted to take to hacking. “Naturally, girls too want to be a big part of this sub-culture, although it’s tough for them to be taken seriously,” he adds.

Perhaps the best-known female Chinese hacking team was a group called the Six Golden Flowers, whose members have since broken up.

“Some of the girls in that group were taken pretty seriously,” notes Henderson. Last year, security media sources in China named one of the ‘Six Golden Flowers’ as probably the most active and influential Chinese hacker.

Another female Chinese hacker from the same group, known online as the Dark Angel, has established a “commercial hacker trainer website”, offering individual classes for a fee and even a year-long structured course in hacking, says Henderson. One of China’s top female hackers, in his estimation, is Wang Juan, 27, who goes by the online name of Wollf and is celebrated as “the mother of Chinese Trojans”.

One of the unique aspects of Chinese hackers, according to Henderson, is their sense of nationalism and collectivism, which is in stark contrast to the Western stereotype of the loner working from a basement. But in recent times, he adds, that the nationalist cyber-army has disintegrated into a band of “capitalist criminals”.

A lot of hacking these days is about money - “sometimes legally, by taking ads on their websites, selling hacking programs and classes and magazines, but at other times illegally, by stealing virtual property and virtual currency used in online games, and selling it for real-world money.”

Security experts have characterised China’s hacking community as a “proxy army” that is manipulated by the Communist Party to carry out cyber-espionage on its behalf, but Henderson isn’t entirely convinced of that.

“Beijing sure knows who these people are, but I don’t think it’s right to say these hackers are puppets of Beijing,” he says. It’s one thing, he notes, that hackers would gladly give any information they gather from their enterprise to the government: they would consider it their “patriotic duty” to do that. But it’s more likely, he says, that hackers would happily sell any information they gather to another government. “Sometimes money trumps nationalism,” he points out.

So, can Beijing control China’s hackers to do its bidding? “Yes and no,” says Henderson.

“At times Beijing has had a difficult time maintaining control... However, if tomorrow, there’s a conflict that China is involved in, hackers would self-mobilise. They would automatically get involved in cyberwarfare.”

And, who knows, ‘General’ Xiao Tian could well be leading from the front.