Part I: Hacker Women Are Few But Strong

June 2 -- Kevin Mitnick. Mafiaboy. Onel de Guzman. Alleged computer vandals.

All men.

But for a few brief days last month, Philippine police thought the “Love Bug” computer virus was written by Onel’s sister, Irene de Guzman. Their search inadvertently uncovered a group so elusive that it has fallen under the radar of sociologists; so rare that its inhabitants don’t often know each other exists.

“I found it very difficult to find any female hackers whatsoever,” said Paul Taylor, a British sociologist and author of Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime. According to the U.S. Commerce department, 28.5 percent of computer programmers are women, but their participation in the hacker subculture — a loose association of chat rooms, group meetings, Web pages and conventions by which hackers trade information — is reportedly tiny.

But female hackers do exist. They are queens of pirated software, anti-child-porn crusaders, political activists and leaders of private online vendettas. ABCNEWS.com spoke to more than a dozen of them from the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Part of an underground society which often has the misogynistic stink of a high school boys’ locker room, these tough women show the guys they can match their game.

A note about names: Like most hackers, these women choose to go by online handles. Real names will be noted as such.

Hacktivists, Phreaks and Crusaders

“I know a few women who have been around for quite a while and are widely respected in the specific hacking scene,” said Courtnee, a 20-year-old hacker based in the Pacific Northwest.

The Electronic Civil Disobedience project, an online political performance-art group, called its 1999 attack on the Pentagon conceptual art. It said it was protesting U.S. support of the Mexican suppression of rebels in southern Mexico. A woman, Carmin Karasic (her real name), helped write FloodNet, the tool used by ECD to bombard its opponents with access requests in a symbolic, harmless version of the denial-of-service attacks that took down CNN and Yahoo this February.

“We do it to make a political gesture. We’re not cyberterrorists…but it showed that it’s possible to mobilize mass numbers of people around a particular cause virtually instantly,” Karasic said. ECD’s movement attracted 20,000 sympathizers, she said.