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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3699 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

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Lately on twitter, I’ve been seeing accounts of quite attractive young women, who are network engineers or security specialist or similar. Most of them have somewhat high following counts in the +20k. There are a bunch of similarities between them. They often have pronounce in the bio and sell some sort of book or course on how to do, what they do. Looking at the technical content they put out, it seems like incredibly basic stuff, such as running a password cracker like Hydra or running WireShark. All their Github profiles are more or less empty with no contributions to speak of. They seem to do little or no code at all, but they all appear to have employment in tech companies of various sorts.

I have only ever had one course in security, so I don’t know much about the field, but it was almost exclusively writing exploits in Assembly and some C. We were only allowed to use some basic tools to hexdump a binary and such. I do realize that in the real world you would use all sorts of tools available to you, but still, I would expect somewhat heavier technical skills displayed.

So I’m sort of confused. What do they actually do in their jobs? They don’t seem to have skills that I thought were required for that type of work. Are they just DEI hires? Why do they have so many followers? Is it just tech guys simping over women? Is the algorithm pushing them for some reason? I basically never see any such men (or maybe it is just my stupid ass only noticing the attractive women).

Does someone here work in the field, who can enlighten me?

Some examples of the most prominent:

https://twitter.com/TracketPacer

https://twitter.com/notshenetworks

https://twitter.com/inversecos

https://twitter.com/cybersecmeg

Why would you expect Twitter popularity to correlate strongly with display of technical skills?

I wouldn't necessarily in general, but at least for the accounts that I see, where they promote themselves as professionals in some domain (not necessarily tech), there does seem to be a pretty strong correlation between skill, creativity, credentials or output and their following counts. Then again, that is hard to say for sure, since it is not a random sample.

Yeah, I think the base rate could be really low. There's a selection pressure for charisma and attractiveness, of course, but also financial incentives. Contributors have a lot less reason to cultivate their Twitter following if they can't monetize it with a book or something.

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