Cyberattacks are uniquely destabilizing for women

Women and other marginalized groups in society experience and use the cyberspace differently. They are often disproportionately harmed by cyber threats and encounter additional, gendered forms of cyberviolence. Digital technologies can carry existing gender norms and gendered systems of oppression and abuse from the offline world into digital spaces.13 They can aggravate and aggregate existing forms of threat and abuse, even create entirely new ones,14 and carry offline consequences for women, creating a continuum of gendered violence.15 Additionally, already vulnerable groups often face barriers or further risks when accessing or applying cybersecurity mechanisms. While the experience of cyber threats and cybersecurity interventions can be different based on gender, this difference is not commonly represented in the policies and practices around cybersecurity.16 To address this, cybersecurity threat assessments should consider how traditional cybersecurity threats, such as attacks on critical infrastructure, have gendered impacts but also emphasize non-traditional cybersecurity threats that disproportionally affect women and women’s rights organizations. Such threats that have traditionally been underrepresented in cybersecurity policy fora, on the multilateral as well as regional and national levels, but that are particularly relevant from a gender perspective are online gender-based violence (GBV), surveillance and privacy violations, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQI+ radicalization and mobilization online, as well as gendered aspects of cybercrime such as human trafficking online. Women are more often or more severely affected by digital violence in the form of harassment, surveillance and violations of privacy, doxing, cyber-stalking, disinformation, and the spread of fake news and false information about individuals, as well as non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and unauthorized pornography.17 Other cyber threats recognized by conventional understandings of cybersecurity, and are not gendered in their origin, still carry differentiated gendered impacts. For example, internet shutdowns like the 2016 Russian shutdown of the internet in Crimea or shutdowns resulting from 2016 cyber attacks in Libya, did not target women specifically. However, they caused women to lose their means of external communication and access to critical information, crucial tools to ensure their personal safety outside the home, platforms for informal work and e-commerce with detriments for their economic well-being, and access to other online services such as education.26 Data breaches may also carry differentiated gendered impacts – for example, in cases where breaches of medical data exposed the personal information of medical professionals providing reproductive services and care, and of the patients receiving them.